Inbit Messenger - own client-server IM network
Good all the time of day. I want to tell the Habrasoobschestvu about a wonderful, almost one-of-a-kind program:
Inbit Messenger is a client-server system for organizing an instant messaging network on a Win (* nix / Wine) network platform.
The program combines the capabilities of ICQ / Jabber, IRC, Email, allows you to keep a general to-do list, contains a file sharing counterpart, URL-links and other conveniences for organizing collaboration.
Perhaps the most important thing is that it does not depend on external services like AOL / Oscar, it allows you to create your own server, which can be on a local network, or be accessible via the Internet.
Inbit Messenger is perfect for intra-office communications, has a good balance between deployment speed, functionality and ease of administration.
')
Unfortunately, the program is little known, which I hope to fix.
Further - more. (I ask you not to judge strictly beforehand - for the first time I decided to write on Habré ..)
Almost always, combining several computers into a network, people think about how they communicate with each other, and, if possible, more convenient.
At one time, Fido united people, and this network suited many, although it was far from modern ideas of convenience - people suffered from low communication speed and low functionality due to the lack of alternatives.
With the advent of the Internet and e-mail, convenience has increased, although it was not ideal for all people. Forums and mail allowed to bring the news to the person from the other end of the globe, but the feeling of the interlocutor was not enough.
The development of technology has given people web chats, which has accelerated communication by an order of magnitude, and has created an analogue of conference communication, but the mechanism of periodic jumps of a considerable page size on those communication channels often negated the convenience of communication.
IRC, of ​​course, was a much more technologically beautiful solution, but to this day it has remained difficult to master by the majority of Internet users.
A real revelation was the creation of the ICQ program, which among the people won great love and a rapidly growing audience for the convenience, simplicity and accessibility.
The ability to conduct real-time correspondence, see the interlocutor’s presence on the network, send messages offline, share files, along with the ability for users to master users with a level of advancement just above what’s enough for chat rooms - it’s not enough for the masses. network at the next level.
Of course, a great many analogs followed, a scheme from large companies that wanted to capture more users appeared, which did not benefit the unity of the society of people who needed to communicate.
The company, created by ICQ, was bought by a large corporation that wanted to extract money from a promising invention, and this marked the beginning of pulling the blanket over each of the players on the Internet Pagers market, or IM, as the technology called.
Official communication programs were overgrown with advertising banners, or became clearly paid, and the server parts were always closed to the people, so as not to give an opportunity to become independent from the companies owning IM.
The answer of the free community was the development of alternative customers, not burdened by advertising and an open protocol, conceived to create a system of free communication. Unfortunately, for a long time the result of these studies, the XMPP protocol and the Jabber system shared the fate of the IRC, remaining the lot of IT specialists and enthusiasts ...
The essence of the slippery moments in the current state of affairs began to emerge lately, when, for example, the corporation owning the IM pager ICQ decided to “shake” off from its service the users of alternative clients who did not generate income from advertising. This was reflected in the selective blocking of unwanted users in large quantities and considerable unrest on the web. It was confirmed that many people were quite strongly tied to the usual programs, and some did not want to switch to official clients because of a quite noticeable lag in convenience from their favorite alternative customers, while others did not even suspect that there were any protocols ... And in the corporate environment there was a completely understandable reluctance to introduce foreign software products with closed code, often containing unwanted functionality, + in licensing agreements it was clearly indicated that the information Rendered by such products is no longer the property of the users, and it can be used without their consent and not the fact that they are not harmful ...
Public attention has become increasingly turn to Jabber, the benefit of many of the "alternative" customers from birth supported multiprotocol, and XMPP in particular. This system does not depend on anyone's financial ambitions, striving for power and a tied audience, it is not inferior in functionality to the aforementioned commercial IM, but is not without a single weak point (this moment may seem controversial, of course, but I describe the situation when the audience consists not from selected system administrators).
Jabber requires organizing your own server, or using a public one. Own server is often not so easy to maintain and there is no one to administer, and a public one can be far less stable than a commercial IM server ...
Of course, ratings of accounting for the stability of Jabber servers have long been compiled, and everyone is free to choose any ... But this is not what suits everyone ... Remember, it was simplicity and accessibility that once brought popularity to ICQ ... People don’t always want freedom of choice more often, people want it to be “simple and like everybody’s”, and they don’t have to go through different servers and transfer a roster ...
And in addition there remains one more weak link of the IM-scheme of communication. If a public server is used, all interlocutors should have access to the Internet. So this is obvious, and not a problem now, you say ... And you will be right, but do not forget what country we live in, and how reliable our providers are ...
Often, people gather in a home / district / city network, and use either a common Internet channel, which can “fall” at an inappropriate moment, or have their own outputs, but then at an inappropriate moment the provider’s account may run out, losing the ability to communicate with others.
What can solve this problem? As I wrote above, you can set up your Jabber server, but there may not be the necessary enthusiasts on the network who will take on organizing it ...
You can use "local chats" - programs that resemble IRC, and work without a dedicated server - turned on and chat. But IT-aware people know the disadvantage of such solutions: they use the so-called. broadcast packets i. ANY message is sent to ALL at once, everyone processes it, and displays recipients. This works well when there are few users, but when the audience rolls over several dozens / hundreds, the chaos of traffic, hated by admins, begins on the network.
And one of the most intractable limitations is that such programs do not work in large segmented networks, because routers cut broadcast packets, isolating users in small groups of house / district sizes.
The solution is simple and beautiful - use a system with a dedicated server.
The question is, which of them will “pull” the community of such a network? I will not mention 3 times about Jabber (not that I don’t like it - rather the opposite ... but it doesn’t fit everywhere).
And here users are wondering - what to put? To work locally, without the Internet, unite the entire network, be easy to use, convenient and functional?
Many people choose Commfort Chat , and get almost the same IRC, and quite satisfied.
But, at times, people want something more. And there is almost no choice.
A similar question is often asked by system administrators of companies of different sizes, when it is necessary to organize a single information space for employees. IM support was excluded from MS Exchange, and the same Jabber may not be what is required - sometimes even a few heavyweight tools, the administration of which is not quite flexible and convenient, or something else is missing ...
In searching for the ideal, you can try many tools, but, in my opinion, the program for which this article is written has the best balance between functionality, convenience, flexibility and controllability.
In a variety of sources, it is called the best solution of its kind, there are almost no worthy alternatives, and, assessing it, it is very difficult to force yourself to turn to other options.
Developers, unfortunately, are not very conducive to the prevalence of their product, they give to use in trial mode only the demo version, and the prices for the sane number of licenses, which is called, symbolize ...
My work is intended to correct this omission, and to give people the opportunity to fully appreciate the convenience of the product, and organizations decide whether to buy it and adopt it.
The Inbit Messenger program is an IM-communication system, similar to ICQ, IRC and Email at the same time, and containing the functionality of a file server, a tool for screenshots.
It is suitable for both small and large networks. In practice, it is lightweight enough to quietly serve 2-5 users, but if there are enough server resources, it can cope with hundreds, and the developers claim that with thousands of users at the same time. System requirements depend only on the size of the network audience.
The program is organized as “server”, “client” and “administration console” components, as well as auxiliary mini-applications for viewing history files and the internal mail format.
The distribution is small, the installation gives the effect of the result "out of the box", and takes about 10-15 minutes.
Almost everything is configured and controlled from the server, or "admin", users, if necessary, are divided into groups, which allows you to give them personally, or by the principle of belonging to certain privileges.
At the same time, from the user's point of view, everything looks almost like ICQ, and the administrator, if there is one, can manage multiple users with ease in the style of mail servers under Windows equipped with graphical control panels.
Users are given a contact list with division into groups and departments (with the ability to control the display of other contacts from the server), a multi-tab window of conversations with the ability to quickly transfer files using p2p technology, while the images are displayed immediately in the conversations window. Smileys, different fonts and lights, status messages, convenient history management, avatars and contact information profiles, personal contact list support, ignore list, pop-up alerts - all this is very similar to the usual features that everyone enjoyed in traditional Internet -pagers
But Inbit Messenger also provides the ability to write each other emails, send pop-up ads, manage the to-do list, publish public notes, links, use shared files stored on the server. You can even quickly demonstrate the image of the site, or the windows of any program, using the built-in screen capture tool, which can work in several modes, and eliminates the need to use PrintScreen and Paint (when Windows is out of the box).
And the administrator of the server allows you to keep all this in order, avoiding confusion and permissiveness. Virtually any action can be recorded in the log, according to server policy, and stopped immediately, if not appropriate where the system is installed.
For example, you can create a group of inexperienced users whose rights will not allow the server to overload with a huge amount of stored files, a group with its own private channel to discuss confidential issues, a group of moderators who could clean up the channels, clean obscene files and have access to the history downloads / downloads.
Inbit Messenger can operate in a strictly ordered corporate environment for access to information, and can be extremely friendly chat for an equal network of network users.
All this works completely independent of the Internet, but allows you to organize access from external networks - then Inbit Messenger can be similar to the same Jabber and unite several offices of the organization, saving the sysadmin from having to allow disparate users to access ICQ, through which an insider can work .
By giving users a purely internal "ICQ" and "mail", which, in addition to all that, support Rijndael encryption, the system administrator will seriously protect the organization from the risks of leaking commercially valuable information.
Inbit Messenger supports interaction with Active Directory , allowing users to avoid storing unnecessary passwords, and the administrator giving additional centralized management.
Internal mail can be sent to an arbitrary Email server.
The server keeps statistics on the use of functions, which is useful in reports for management.
The system’s simplified client for Windows Mobile , which works perfectly through both WiFi and GPRS, adds additional flexibility.
The server allows using an arbitrary port for connection, the protocol implementation is quite elegant, and the packet format is similar to XMPP, the configuration files are based on the XML format, and the server database can optionally use encryption transparently.
IMHO, the developers saved on the designer - in the official version, the interface is crooked, the icons are inconspicuous, and the official localization extends only to the client, and it’s made by a person, it seems, for the second or third time in their life they translated the software product ...
For Russian realities, it is not unimportant that, before purchasing, it is possible to evaluate the capabilities of the product in full size, without unnecessary restrictions, but this is available only if the version has a number two major digits less than the current one ...
Because of my desire and ability, I tried to correct these problems, as far as I could, and starting from yesterday, both Russian-speaking and foreign audiences can learn in advance what they will acquire by transferring funds to Inbit Inc. resellers.
I did a full interface translation, sometimes correcting it in accordance with usability considerations. In addition to the visual make-up, I corrected the authors' flaws, and collected the MSI client packages for centralized installation via Active Directory.
You can get acquainted with the culprit of the news on the site of developers , thefull evaluation version is now available on torrent.ru and on board.
Thank you all for your attention.
Inbit Messenger is a client-server system for organizing an instant messaging network on a Win (* nix / Wine) network platform.
The program combines the capabilities of ICQ / Jabber, IRC, Email, allows you to keep a general to-do list, contains a file sharing counterpart, URL-links and other conveniences for organizing collaboration.
Perhaps the most important thing is that it does not depend on external services like AOL / Oscar, it allows you to create your own server, which can be on a local network, or be accessible via the Internet.
Inbit Messenger is perfect for intra-office communications, has a good balance between deployment speed, functionality and ease of administration.
')
Unfortunately, the program is little known, which I hope to fix.
Further - more. (I ask you not to judge strictly beforehand - for the first time I decided to write on Habré ..)
To begin with, to explain why it is worth paying attention to the subject, I will allow myself a lyrical introduction (quite a few letters ..)
Almost always, combining several computers into a network, people think about how they communicate with each other, and, if possible, more convenient.
At one time, Fido united people, and this network suited many, although it was far from modern ideas of convenience - people suffered from low communication speed and low functionality due to the lack of alternatives.
With the advent of the Internet and e-mail, convenience has increased, although it was not ideal for all people. Forums and mail allowed to bring the news to the person from the other end of the globe, but the feeling of the interlocutor was not enough.
The development of technology has given people web chats, which has accelerated communication by an order of magnitude, and has created an analogue of conference communication, but the mechanism of periodic jumps of a considerable page size on those communication channels often negated the convenience of communication.
IRC, of ​​course, was a much more technologically beautiful solution, but to this day it has remained difficult to master by the majority of Internet users.
A real revelation was the creation of the ICQ program, which among the people won great love and a rapidly growing audience for the convenience, simplicity and accessibility.
The ability to conduct real-time correspondence, see the interlocutor’s presence on the network, send messages offline, share files, along with the ability for users to master users with a level of advancement just above what’s enough for chat rooms - it’s not enough for the masses. network at the next level.
Of course, a great many analogs followed, a scheme from large companies that wanted to capture more users appeared, which did not benefit the unity of the society of people who needed to communicate.
The company, created by ICQ, was bought by a large corporation that wanted to extract money from a promising invention, and this marked the beginning of pulling the blanket over each of the players on the Internet Pagers market, or IM, as the technology called.
Official communication programs were overgrown with advertising banners, or became clearly paid, and the server parts were always closed to the people, so as not to give an opportunity to become independent from the companies owning IM.
The answer of the free community was the development of alternative customers, not burdened by advertising and an open protocol, conceived to create a system of free communication. Unfortunately, for a long time the result of these studies, the XMPP protocol and the Jabber system shared the fate of the IRC, remaining the lot of IT specialists and enthusiasts ...
The essence of the slippery moments in the current state of affairs began to emerge lately, when, for example, the corporation owning the IM pager ICQ decided to “shake” off from its service the users of alternative clients who did not generate income from advertising. This was reflected in the selective blocking of unwanted users in large quantities and considerable unrest on the web. It was confirmed that many people were quite strongly tied to the usual programs, and some did not want to switch to official clients because of a quite noticeable lag in convenience from their favorite alternative customers, while others did not even suspect that there were any protocols ... And in the corporate environment there was a completely understandable reluctance to introduce foreign software products with closed code, often containing unwanted functionality, + in licensing agreements it was clearly indicated that the information Rendered by such products is no longer the property of the users, and it can be used without their consent and not the fact that they are not harmful ...
Public attention has become increasingly turn to Jabber, the benefit of many of the "alternative" customers from birth supported multiprotocol, and XMPP in particular. This system does not depend on anyone's financial ambitions, striving for power and a tied audience, it is not inferior in functionality to the aforementioned commercial IM, but is not without a single weak point (this moment may seem controversial, of course, but I describe the situation when the audience consists not from selected system administrators).
Jabber requires organizing your own server, or using a public one. Own server is often not so easy to maintain and there is no one to administer, and a public one can be far less stable than a commercial IM server ...
Of course, ratings of accounting for the stability of Jabber servers have long been compiled, and everyone is free to choose any ... But this is not what suits everyone ... Remember, it was simplicity and accessibility that once brought popularity to ICQ ... People don’t always want freedom of choice more often, people want it to be “simple and like everybody’s”, and they don’t have to go through different servers and transfer a roster ...
And in addition there remains one more weak link of the IM-scheme of communication. If a public server is used, all interlocutors should have access to the Internet. So this is obvious, and not a problem now, you say ... And you will be right, but do not forget what country we live in, and how reliable our providers are ...
Often, people gather in a home / district / city network, and use either a common Internet channel, which can “fall” at an inappropriate moment, or have their own outputs, but then at an inappropriate moment the provider’s account may run out, losing the ability to communicate with others.
What can solve this problem? As I wrote above, you can set up your Jabber server, but there may not be the necessary enthusiasts on the network who will take on organizing it ...
You can use "local chats" - programs that resemble IRC, and work without a dedicated server - turned on and chat. But IT-aware people know the disadvantage of such solutions: they use the so-called. broadcast packets i. ANY message is sent to ALL at once, everyone processes it, and displays recipients. This works well when there are few users, but when the audience rolls over several dozens / hundreds, the chaos of traffic, hated by admins, begins on the network.
And one of the most intractable limitations is that such programs do not work in large segmented networks, because routers cut broadcast packets, isolating users in small groups of house / district sizes.
The solution is simple and beautiful - use a system with a dedicated server.
The question is, which of them will “pull” the community of such a network? I will not mention 3 times about Jabber (not that I don’t like it - rather the opposite ... but it doesn’t fit everywhere).
And here users are wondering - what to put? To work locally, without the Internet, unite the entire network, be easy to use, convenient and functional?
Many people choose Commfort Chat , and get almost the same IRC, and quite satisfied.
But, at times, people want something more. And there is almost no choice.
A similar question is often asked by system administrators of companies of different sizes, when it is necessary to organize a single information space for employees. IM support was excluded from MS Exchange, and the same Jabber may not be what is required - sometimes even a few heavyweight tools, the administration of which is not quite flexible and convenient, or something else is missing ...
In searching for the ideal, you can try many tools, but, in my opinion, the program for which this article is written has the best balance between functionality, convenience, flexibility and controllability.
In a variety of sources, it is called the best solution of its kind, there are almost no worthy alternatives, and, assessing it, it is very difficult to force yourself to turn to other options.
Developers, unfortunately, are not very conducive to the prevalence of their product, they give to use in trial mode only the demo version, and the prices for the sane number of licenses, which is called, symbolize ...
My work is intended to correct this omission, and to give people the opportunity to fully appreciate the convenience of the product, and organizations decide whether to buy it and adopt it.
This concludes the lyrical introduction and goes on to the subject description of the subject.
The Inbit Messenger program is an IM-communication system, similar to ICQ, IRC and Email at the same time, and containing the functionality of a file server, a tool for screenshots.
It is suitable for both small and large networks. In practice, it is lightweight enough to quietly serve 2-5 users, but if there are enough server resources, it can cope with hundreds, and the developers claim that with thousands of users at the same time. System requirements depend only on the size of the network audience.
The program is organized as “server”, “client” and “administration console” components, as well as auxiliary mini-applications for viewing history files and the internal mail format.
The distribution is small, the installation gives the effect of the result "out of the box", and takes about 10-15 minutes.
Almost everything is configured and controlled from the server, or "admin", users, if necessary, are divided into groups, which allows you to give them personally, or by the principle of belonging to certain privileges.
At the same time, from the user's point of view, everything looks almost like ICQ, and the administrator, if there is one, can manage multiple users with ease in the style of mail servers under Windows equipped with graphical control panels.
Users are given a contact list with division into groups and departments (with the ability to control the display of other contacts from the server), a multi-tab window of conversations with the ability to quickly transfer files using p2p technology, while the images are displayed immediately in the conversations window. Smileys, different fonts and lights, status messages, convenient history management, avatars and contact information profiles, personal contact list support, ignore list, pop-up alerts - all this is very similar to the usual features that everyone enjoyed in traditional Internet -pagers
But Inbit Messenger also provides the ability to write each other emails, send pop-up ads, manage the to-do list, publish public notes, links, use shared files stored on the server. You can even quickly demonstrate the image of the site, or the windows of any program, using the built-in screen capture tool, which can work in several modes, and eliminates the need to use PrintScreen and Paint (when Windows is out of the box).
And the administrator of the server allows you to keep all this in order, avoiding confusion and permissiveness. Virtually any action can be recorded in the log, according to server policy, and stopped immediately, if not appropriate where the system is installed.
For example, you can create a group of inexperienced users whose rights will not allow the server to overload with a huge amount of stored files, a group with its own private channel to discuss confidential issues, a group of moderators who could clean up the channels, clean obscene files and have access to the history downloads / downloads.
Inbit Messenger can operate in a strictly ordered corporate environment for access to information, and can be extremely friendly chat for an equal network of network users.
All this works completely independent of the Internet, but allows you to organize access from external networks - then Inbit Messenger can be similar to the same Jabber and unite several offices of the organization, saving the sysadmin from having to allow disparate users to access ICQ, through which an insider can work .
By giving users a purely internal "ICQ" and "mail", which, in addition to all that, support Rijndael encryption, the system administrator will seriously protect the organization from the risks of leaking commercially valuable information.
Inbit Messenger supports interaction with Active Directory , allowing users to avoid storing unnecessary passwords, and the administrator giving additional centralized management.
Internal mail can be sent to an arbitrary Email server.
The server keeps statistics on the use of functions, which is useful in reports for management.
The system’s simplified client for Windows Mobile , which works perfectly through both WiFi and GPRS, adds additional flexibility.
The server allows using an arbitrary port for connection, the protocol implementation is quite elegant, and the packet format is similar to XMPP, the configuration files are based on the XML format, and the server database can optionally use encryption transparently.
But there are no ideal products, and this also has “disadvantages” to one degree or another.
IMHO, the developers saved on the designer - in the official version, the interface is crooked, the icons are inconspicuous, and the official localization extends only to the client, and it’s made by a person, it seems, for the second or third time in their life they translated the software product ...
For Russian realities, it is not unimportant that, before purchasing, it is possible to evaluate the capabilities of the product in full size, without unnecessary restrictions, but this is available only if the version has a number two major digits less than the current one ...
Because of my desire and ability, I tried to correct these problems, as far as I could, and starting from yesterday, both Russian-speaking and foreign audiences can learn in advance what they will acquire by transferring funds to Inbit Inc. resellers.
I did a full interface translation, sometimes correcting it in accordance with usability considerations. In addition to the visual make-up, I corrected the authors' flaws, and collected the MSI client packages for centralized installation via Active Directory.
You can get acquainted with the culprit of the news on the site of developers , the
Thank you all for your attention.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/64998/
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