Forum OpenACS Q&A: Does anyone have any experience with iChat?

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1: Does anyone have any experience with iChat?
Posted by Talli Somekh on 04/24/01 05:52 PM
We have a client interested in iChat. Does anyone have any experience with it?

Specifically, I'm interested in:

A) What kind of effort does it take to install it?
B) What kind of effort is required for support and administration?

Thanks in advance.

tal

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2: Response to Does anyone have any experience with iChat? (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 04/24/01 10:12 PM
I contacted a sales guy at iChat about 6 months ago about integrating it with AOLServer. He promised his technical guys would give me a call after they examined the issues. I never did hear back from the techies, but every month I get an email from the sales butthead, who apparently doesn't remember the promise despite the fact that I remind him after every email poke he sends me.
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3: Response to Does anyone have any experience with iChat? (response to 1)
Posted by Sarah Barwig on 04/27/01 06:55 PM
In a former job, I got to help work with iChat. *shudder*

A) You need an NT server to put it on.

B) You need someone who can read other people's html to make look & feel changes to the html. You need someone who can read lots of pdf manuals and call the iChat guys repeatedly to make the piddling changes (in various and sundry configuration files) your client will want.

Default behavior of iChat is pretty good, but not as good as the demo that your client likely saw. So expect to put in about 3-5 days getting it just right -- after installation, which took maybe 1 day. Our NT guy did that, so I don't know how long it really took.

As for integration with ACS or OpenACS, you may be S.O.L. I know that the custom system we had couldn't be integrated with iChat's notion of users. Possibly if you could get your hands on the source, but all you get is executables and lots of config files.