Good Open Source, Multi-Platform, Secure IM Client?

Phil O. writes "I work for a company with 30+ locations across North America. Some offices have hundreds of employees; some only a dozen. We're looking for a secure, multi-platform IM client we could implement across the organization. One group is pushing for Microsoft's solution, but it has a number of drawbacks (including cost). What other options are out there, and what has worked well in similar situations? Security is a big concern for the company."

Why IM?

[Hatta]

Why not IRC?

Check out SupraBrowser

[Anonymous Coward]

SupraBrowser [sourceforge.net]

It's a secure, threaded IM client (all socket communication 3DES encrypted with a zero-knowledge proof SRPP [stanford.edu]), written in Java, that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It was developed for the hedge fund industry in Boston. I developed it initially, but it's mainly being maintained, not developed further because we don't receive any new feature requests.

Don't let the extensive features fool you. It's primarily a secure, threaded IM system. The other features were added (email gateway, auto-forwarding to email, embedded web browser with sophisticated tagging engine) based on its being used *very* heavily every day and requests coming from highly advanced users of the system.

There is also a Firefox plugin that integrates with it, as well as a pure ajax client written in the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform.

Feel free to contact me personally for any details or help setting it up. The release on sourceforge assumes fairly good technical abilities (building it from ant, getting xulrunner to work with javaxpcom) and is not a general packaged release. However, it is running many places in production.

[e-mail]

David Thomson

Zimbra

[sfbiker]

Check out Zimbra [zimbra.com]

It can replace your Exchange server for email, has an XMLPP IM server built-in, and is much more cost effective and easier to administer than Exchange.

Re:Pidgin + OTR

[srussell]

Note that the OTR plugin is available for several IM clients, including KDE's Kopete, Miranda, mICQ, and several others.

I'm still waiting for it to show up for the Android chat client, but it is still early days...

--- SER

Re:Pidgin + OTR

[BenoitRen]

There's XUL MSN Messenger [mozdev.org], developed by yours truly. It doesn't support display pictures (yet), but otherwise it's pretty solid. I always use it.

Re:skype

[hoytak]

IIRC, the biggest problem about skype in this case is that its license explicitly forbids commercial use. At least w/ the free version.

Re:OTR

[SturdyErde]

First I've heard of OTR. That strategy would helpful for some situations, but sounds like it might not be compliant with corporate legislation such as SOX. Anyone dealt with this question yet?