Hey all - first time posting in IMHO 
My (small) company is slated to start a rather large project for a client in the next few months. We’ve built hundreds of Web sites but never had the opportunity to include a nice chat program in a site - mainly because they cost $$ and no one has had a dire need to use one.
I need a program I can install seamlessly into a site. Java-based chat is most likely what we’re going for. Money is not an object at this point because we want to be able to compare features and present them to the client anyway. No idea what their budget is.
All I know so far is they want to be able to have open chats, different rooms (I THINK they want different ‘rooms’) and “the ability to host web conferences” which I think means moderated chats.
We’d prefer not having to install DLLs on the server but we will have complete access to the server anyway, so if DLL is the way to go that’s ok. Our company is very tight with working with ASP, ASP.NET (C#) and VB. PHP and Perl we can manage but I am not too keen on using PHP or ASP-based chat clients that refresh every x-seconds.
I have looked at the chat software on 12planet.com and it looks great but it’s a tad expensive (we’d want the $1000 Enterprise version with 100 users and possibly source code, which is more $$). I know I said “Money is not an object at this point” but I still want to be able to present the client with a wide array of options.
It’s so hard to find good sites that compare software from a developer’s POV, so I figured I’d ask here to see if anyone has implemented 3rd party chat software on any of their projects and what they can recommend.
If you’ve created a chat program and want to pitch it, that’s cool. Or if you’re a reseller we’ll consider that too. Researching this stuff is a bitch so it’s always nice to hear others’ experience with this.
