For all of these questions, free is ok, but commercial is ok too, as long as the commercial version is significantly better.
I’m an IT guy who would like to enable my 20 users to video chat with each other through our own infrastructure, instead of using something like skype or oovoo. I’ve been researching this for a few days now, but I don’t feel I’m finding the answers I’m hoping to find… Ideally, I would love to build something just like skype or oovoo, with the following characteristics:
· Several people able to chat together and all see each other at the same time
· Able to call from laptop to laptop, regardless of being inside, outside, or across WAN and firewalls…
· Build it once, and have unlimited free usage afterward. In fact, if I could buy an oovoo server for ourselves, that would be perfect. But it’s not oovoo’s sales model.
· (Maybe?) able to include people from outside the company, by invite from the internal users
· (Maybe?) able to call to/from the polycom endpoints
· (Maybe?) able to do voice-only calls
· (Maybe?) able to do instant messaging
And now, the reasons I don’t want to use skype/oovoo:
· Ads, viruses, and worms
· Everything relayed across skype’s or oovoo’s servers. We experience choppiness and jitter as a result. (I want to use my own network, which is very high bandwidth.)
· Contact list management. When we have a new user, I should be able to deploy the new user’s contact info to the existing users, and so on. No need for user interaction in order for everyone to have everyone else in their contact list.
Some are mac users, some are windows. We also have a couple of Polycom endpoints. I have a few questions -
-1-
Based on what I’ve read, I believe I understand correctly that I’ll need to build a gnugk box, and stick it outside our firewall. So the users will be guaranted able to pass media to each other.
But I don’t see any way to build a directory service. Is there something? Bill would like to have a list of usernames in his contact list … Jane, Alex, Mary, etc. He would like to see when they’re online, and simply click their name (or whatever) in order to call that person.
I would like to administratively populate the addressbook with new users, and remove old users when they leave the company. Is there some way for me to achieve these directory requirements?
-2-
The best mac client I can find is xmeeting, but it seems to only support STUN. I’d like to know h460.19 is supported (or at least *some* way to guarantee calls will connect). Can anyone recommend a different/better mac client?
