One of the important items for Jive, is to create the best of breed type features. Bascially, taking generic features such as File Transfer and making it the best ( 1.1 release ). So my question to the community is this:
What would make Group Chats/Conference Room the best?
Thanks,
Derek
Someone must have an opinion on what can make Group Chat the best
I’‘m not sure if this is already possible or not, but if you could send an invite to a group in LDAP/Active Directory and it invite everybody that is online and in that group, that would be kinda cool. Other than that, I guess maybe a shoutcast type thing where the admin/mod could play background music to the entire group. I don’‘t know really. I haven’‘t messed around with this portion much. Oh, maybe a way to set up a group chat future thing that ties in with an email client like Evolution and emails all the people you invite to join that room at a specific time. I don’‘t know, that’'s all I can think of right away.
This functionality may already exist, I just haven’'t tried groupchat much yet as I am still deploying. I would like the ability to have invite only group chats, where only invited people are able to enter/join. Additionally I would like to be able to invite people into any chat, private or otherwise, to simplify the process of finding it. Having a link saying “you were invited to join group_chat_name, click here to join”. Would be easier than navigating through other means.
I must say that the one test I did of group chat made the step of finding group chats on the server through simple navigation much easier than other IM clients I have tried, so you’'ve done well in that area already!
One other wish item would be the ability to drop a file in the group chat, and thus make the file available to everyone there instead of manually sending it to the individual users present.
If I think of anything else I will let you know, I haven’'t used it enough to have many wishes!
Thank you for wanting to make this the best, and I look forward to a linux version !
Regards,
RioGD
lol, background music might be a bit over the top?
I have to agree on the file comment though, making a file available to the whole conference would be huge… Something along the lines of dragging a document onto the chat window and instantly people being able to double click it to see what your talking about…
Additional to that, you could try to import the clipboard image for screenshots.
ie. user hits ‘‘print screen’’ to copy his (windows) screenshot to clipboard, then have an option for spark to import + save that to a file maybe for sharing with others.
You can presently right click a group and then ‘‘invite group to conference’’, but maybe if the invite group functionality was futher linked from the other invite windows it would be cool.
I think you should be careful with any of our suggestions tho Derek,… bogging it down with too many ‘‘features’’ can easily ruin the ease of use of a program.
In the upcoming 1.1 release, we have some nice features already done such as “Send Screenshot” from a chat window (no need to use the clipboard), although you can always just hit ctrl+v to paste in the image into the chat window. However, I do like the file collabaration within Group Chat. Jicks, I totally agree about too many features bogging down a system. We at Jive are looking to really create the best of breed per feature to bring the client along. What is hard, is that people are so used to what IM has always been and to some extent, accepting of them because that is what has always been done. I have found areas of IM that drive me nuts, and the goal is to fix it
Cheers,
Derek
If there were some bots you could run on the server that did “things” that would be nice… trivia bots, file bots, weather bots, badword kick bots, etc…
Ok, it’'s not IN the group chat itself…but…
Oh, and of course whiteboarding 
(group etch-a-sketch heh)…
Hi Derek,
for conference rooms I’'d like to have:
Asterisk-im integration; The moderator should be able to announce a MeetMe room and PIN.
Office integration; It should be possible to create a date in Outlook, Notes or OpenOffice calendars, otherwise you might get an IM conference and an real life meeting at the same time.
A calendar web page for the secretary’'s office so she can track which conferences are scheduled and who takes part and maybe something like the image at the bottom of http://www.areski.net/asterisk-meetme/about.php to display all “active” conferences.
An option to display the whole conference log to the people who enter it more than a little bit to late.
An option to send the chat log to all participants and/or the moderator.
Most things are related to the server and not to the client, but I hope you like the ideas anyhow. Maybe they want to be realized as a plugin / servlet.
Regards, LG
Better late than never: Some feature suggestions:
Option to “listen to group events” on a server. Example: I listen to “creating conference rooms” and get a notification of some sort when a conference room is created.
IRC Command mapping as in http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0045.html#impl-client-irc
Option to auto-join when logging on to jabberserver per conference room. Example: I want to auto-join room1, but not room2 (but both are in my “conferences tab”).
Thanks for a great client,
/John
This is somewhat off topic but meets the “Best of Bred” concept.
I really like the Spark Client, the file transfer actually works! whohooo… where in Gaim it is completly hit or miss. But I do like Gaim for the multi protocol support, that really is nice feature.
One client many friends!!!
thanks for listening
loonybin88
I’'ll add my two cents.
A scripting host for the thing. Seriously.
Bots are a must. I spotted a pretty hot Python one in the wild (tons of functions), but darned if I can get it installed.
If you are still looking for ideas, perhaps emailing each participant a transcipt of the conference once it closes. The entire meeting from first join to last departure should be included. Maybe a header line, like, "This is a transcript of a chat confernece on “date” at “time”. The topic was “subject”.
For me, the addition of voice, whiteboarding and file transfer would be very nice. As an admin, the ability to right click on a name and have the option to view a participants real jid would be nice as well.