Group Chat – But it’s only Windows?

One of the great things about Microsoft products is that we have a great ecosystem. Our partners find customer gaps in our products and produce some amazing solutions. Today I had a customer that asked about cross-platform chat support. The OCS 2007 R2 Group Chat Console is a Windows only client but in education we have customers that can conceivably have any OS client. To that goal we have two partners that I want to spotlight today that have solutions you should review for support chat across your campuses. The first is Formicary.net.

Formicary which has offices New York, Sydney, and London, has developed lots of products that utilize development tools such as Java and .NET. They have had a dedicated team focused on IM and Persistent chat since 2000.  In the case of Group Chat they have developed two products to take advantage of chat. Formicary WebChat is a secure web-based, real-time group chat client which extends and complements the powerful features of OCS 2007 R2 Group Chat. This enables reach access and presence to internal and external users. It also can be embedded into portals including Microsoft SharePoint.

The first graphic below is our Group chat client.

The second is Formicary’s WebChat client.

Since this is a web client there is a zero footprint chat client and it also supports all major browsers. For more information please contact info@formicary.net.

Formicary also has a new silverlight client for group chat and a very cool mobile client seen below.

Another partner ADITI has also created a web client for group chat. This can also be used with any browser and integrated into applications. Unfortunately I don’t have any screenshots of the web client for ADITI to show you. They can be contacted here.