Instant messaging has always been a great tool for keeping in touch with people. Most of the time setting up instant messaging is not a problem, unless of course you are trying to get it to work from a corporate network. Most companies have nothing against intranet or extranet instant messaging; as a matter of fact many encourage intranet messaging amongst employees, but rarely provide any guidance as to how to get it to work when trying to communicate beyond the office. The problem is that corporate network firewall configurations are rarely shared with employees, other than the basic setting required to get the internet browser up and running for external sites. This is rather unfortunate, since most of the time one has to configure the proxy in one way or another: regular proxy, http tunneling, maybe socks4 or socks5, or maybe an automatic configuration URL. You’ll be lucky enough if you are using an instant messaging client that supports or this option, and even luckier if your IT department has any clue what you are talking about, or else you are likely to get the “we do not support this tool” answer. One way to get around this problem is use a web based client since the traffic goes through the regular browser proxy channel; and although the feature set is limited, it works. Most companies such as AOL, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo all provide online versions of their instant messaging clients. The problem is that most of these clients don’t like each other very much, so if you have friends on different services you will have to open several web-clients, quickly transforming your office display into a chaotic plethora of popup windows – good luck getting any work done. The standard solution for dealing with multiple instant messaging services has usually been to install Trillian chat software from Cerulean Studios, which is compatible with most instant messaging services. This however is a catch 22, since Trillian is not web-based and thus will also encounter proxy configuration problems. Back to square one? Maybe not - The other day I ran across a cool little service called meebo which takes the basic Trillian idea and implements it through a web-based interface. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and it is generally very stable and the interface is quite nice as well. You get the usual chat functionality, emoticon support, and it can store logs of your conversations for later review. I would definitely recommend you give it a try if you want to stay in touch with your friends while staying away from your IT department.
no more proxy nightmares with meebo
