Need advanced group chat solution? Try MeetingRoom 1.1

It all started very simple. At Spartez, we wanted to have some means of group communication that would not involve shouting across the room and making an awful lot of noise, which distracted everybody. So we came up with a simple solution - we decided to create a Jabber bot that forwarded mesages sent to it to all other users in its roster.

This was fine for a while and everybody was happy: the noise in the room turned into almost total silence, as everybody was chatting instead of yelling. What's more, people working from home were able to get in touch with their colleagues, which made our office more "virtual", friendly and flexible. 

After a while though, people started chatting not only about work, but exchange jokes, talk about what they did on weeked and so on. This started to resemble the original problem - this time in cyberspace instead of in the physical space. So we added another bot, just for "work stuff". Then we got split into multiple projects, so we added a bot per project, so each project team had one. Of course, this meant that we needed to have more powerful user management, and also required some automation to chatroom bot creation.

Then, people wanted to be able to search past conversations, as they contained valuable group knowledge. This required creation of a web front-end and adding a database to store conversations. While we were at it, we added ability to upload and share files. Then people from outside of the office - hell, from half way across the planet - started using the chartooms.

Then, more and more features were added and one day we decided to turn the project into a commercial application. 

And so the MeetingRoom chat server was born - it is available for a very reasonable money (starting from $10 for a starter version). It can also be freely evaluated for 30 days from the initial install. And - it is free for open source projects and charity and non-profit organizations.

Some features include:

• Integration with any Jabber server - MeetingRoom uses XMPP as transport protocol
• drag&drop file upload
• chat from any Jabber client or from web interface
• advanced chatroom and user management
• simplified chatroom  creation on a federated Jabber server and on Google Talk server
• many commands for enhancing your chatroom conversations
• integration with external applications and services, such as
• Atlassian JIRA and Confluence
• Wikipedia
• Google maps
• Google translate
• Architecture extensible through plugins
• Embedding MeetingRoom chatrooms into Atlassian Confluence pages and blog posts, using the meetingroom macro

But wait! There is more. 

We have decided to do something a bit crazy.

In order to celebrate the release of
version 1.1 of MeetingRoom,
we have decided to give away free unlimited licenses
to first 100 (that's one hundred) users who ask for them. 

In order to apply, shoot us an email at 
mr-freelicense@spartez.com