iChat on Google

In a much earlier post I touted the virtues of iChat especially with our own XServer based Jabber Server. At the time it was the best solution, but it was never good enough to carry it to enterprise status. It was a few steps to complicated to setup and not everyone was onboard, sound familiar. We did see iChat become the dominate chat client at our university typically used with AIM or GTalk. Well today I am pitching a new institutional carrier for iChat. I have mentioned that we recently moved all of our GFU accounts to Google for all their services except email and we have done this with a fairly quiet introduction. We recently brought down our iChat Jabber Server due to an XServer upgrade and when asked when it would be back online I asked myself, why. Why not just use the GTalk client with our GFU Google accounts. It works great, you get chat, audio, video and screen sharing and everyone knows everyone else’s account, plus it is open to the outside. The slight downside is that it is not as private as our own Jabber, but simplicity and success can justify losing that sales pitch.