Instant Messenger - Internal

[lacasa]

Yahoo IM is used to communicate with other employees with the LAN. Unfortunately there is a lot of not work related chatting going on. I want to disable or stop anyone from installing any external IM. Is there an internal IM solution - preferably free since we are a non-profit.

I have 30 clients on a Win 2k server with active directory. I also have Exchange, but I have not installed it yet. Our email is handled for free by a local ISP. Does Exchange have IM.

 

[Saugilsr]

Im preety sure you can do that with Jabber. It allows you to setup your own IM chat server and works just like most IM systems.

 

[Saugilsr]

Oh. Having said that. AIM and MSN (and maybe Yahoo im not sure) all have web based IM client now. Which is a real pain here at a school cause there's nothing I can do about those. So just keep in mind your users may just move over to a web based client.

 

[Mich]

We use Reuters Messaging here. It works pretty well. I don't know its price.

-If it ain't broke, break it and make it better.

 

[Auger282]

saugilsr.. block the pages..

 

[Saugilsr]

I did that on our old router but we have a new cisco 1721 and I havnt figure out how to do that yet. Even so all the students knew websites to go to that let you override what ever web filters you have. So I never got ahead.
Now as long as I can prevent them donig damage to the machine setup I let the teachers monitor wether the students are doing what they should be.