I've used an old PC at work to set up an internal chat server. (I used ejabberd, running under ubuntu, in case that means anything to you.) It's been through a couple of incarnations -- in fact, its first existence was based on Openfire, but the latter doesn't seem to want to play ball with me when it comes to updates and nobody cared when I said they'd need to set up their accounts again -- but it seems uncontroversial, it works reliably on a relatively ancient PC that was headed for the junkpile, and it doesn't use any valuable Windows licenses.
Which is all very fine and pleasant but a couple of people are now pushing me to add videoconferencing facilities to it -- the point being that they don't want to install Skype when we might be able to do something internally.
So suddenly I need either one or two things and I'm either googling badly or what I want isn't available without paying some third party to provide it. I need a chat client that can also handle voice and video, and if ejabberd can't handle the binary streams without help, I need some sort of plugin for it.
I started researching this on the assumption that it wasn't going to be rocket science and that I'd find a solution really easily.
Guess what? I haven't got any sort of handle on what to do. There have been suggestions that I need a SIP server (which looks complicated and possibly far more than is actually required) but I have yet to find anything that looks like a simple recipe for what I want to do.
Anybody here done anything like this? Or can point me at an online resource I can go and bang my forehead against for a while, before deciding I'm out of my depth? (I pretend to understand a bit about ubuntu but if I'm honest, I'm happiest with a gui, these days!)
