Happy Customers

It seems like people from all over the world are interested in MeetingRoom group chat server. Sometimes they come from places where you would never expect to get customers. And they seem to like it a lot.

Yesterday, we received this testimonial from Isra Software & Computer, located in Nablus, Palestine:

Many thanks for you, and your company. We are now enjoying our teams business chat. [...]
Teams communication was one of our major needs


We wish you all the best

So why don't you also become our customer? We still have free MeetingRoom licenses left! Send us an email to apply for a license at mr-freelicense@spartez.com

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

Skitch for Windows? Not really. But let's go further than that.

Pretty much every Mac fanboy knows and likes Skitch. Me too, although I seldom use Mac.

There is however one major (OK, more than one to be honest ;)) problem with Skitch. It's only for Mac OSX and there is no sight of so desired Windows support. In fact the original blog post at Skitch website (dated March 2008) about it has been mysteriously removed - here is the cached version by Google. Not to mention Linux. Another drawback is that you cannot easily access Skitch from anywhere. You have to install it first. Inconvenient.

ScreenSnipe comes to the rescue.

When I completely switched my development environment to Linux, I missed so much a screenshotting tool which would be as simple and beautiful as Skitch. Gimp made me mad (sure, after years I've finally mastered it, but initially, to draw one stupid arrow and a text, I almost cut myself). Thus I decided to write my own screenshot app. That's how ScreenSnipe was born.


I wanted to go one step further – make it really cross-platform and installation-less. A screenshotting tool for the 21st century and Web 2.0 era.
I think I am getting there. ScreenSnipe is maybe not so snappy (yet) as Skitch, but it has some completely unique features, it evolves quite fast and is really installation-less (directly available from the web browser) for all these 100-million or so PC users who happen to have Java 6 installed on their boxes. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (and maybe on other systems which I have not had a chance to test).

A couple of months ago I released a fully integrated ScreenSnipe with Atlassian JIRA – my beloved issue tracker. Last weekend I released something which I desired even more – simple yet powerful and collaborative (editable) screenshots directly in Atlassian Confluence – a wiki (or perhaps I should say a collaboration platform) which I love and use every day.
ScreenSnipe for Confluence makes an annotated screenshot a first class citizen of this enterprise collaboration system. Not only you can easily make screenshot and annotate it in many ways, disguise, emphasise, crop, zoom. You can publish your screenshot with a single click in Confluence page (or blog, or comment) and this picture will be editable (as vector graphics) for every person who can modify attachments of this page. You can easily just replace the underlying screenshot, leaving the annotations intact or just slightly modified to match new graphics.
Think about technical documentation (and pictures often not catching up with the evolving UI), release notes, visual discussions, UI and UX reviews, QA. All of these is now hopefully much simpler and more effective.



ScreenSnipe for Confluence (as well as SS for JIRA) comes with a completely free 30-day trial. Installation on the server side is really simple (just upload a single jar file). No need to do anything on the client side.

Enjoy.

P.S. To celebrate the release, ScreenSnipe for Confluence is currently offered with 20% discount.