A Free Video Chat Server

Though there are plenty of free video chat services like Gtalk, Skype, etc all these services are plagued with privacy or cost. When any employee uses these services, management is always concerned with security and misuse of these services. On the other hand if you buy them or use business version of these services hosted at a provider site they might not give appropriate return on investment. One way of handling above issues is to use an in house setup. Here again there would be cost associated with both hardware and software, and this is where you can use '123flashchat' a Flash-based chat server which can be downloaded for free from http://www.123flashchat. com/download.html (not even registration needed) and can be freely used by up to 10 users.

The setup

Being Flash-based gives great flexibility; there is no need of a client machine. One just needs a browser to hook to a chat room. In our sample setup we installed this server on a standard desktop with 2 GB of RAM running Windows 7. Installation is simple to carry out and in few clicks you are ready with your own private video chat server.

Configuration

Once installion is over there is a browser shortcut generated on the desktop. Click on it and you have interface to configure your chat server. From this page, click on 'Admin Panel' and then log in using default user name and password mentioned on top of the page (admin). Once you are in the admin panel you can configure this chat server according to your need. Going through each item would be cumbersome, therefore we would focus on few of them. First go to 'User Management' and add users along with their credentials (passwords etc), to free your chat server from all the default chat rooms. Go to 'Room Settings' and remove them from the list and then create a single room (PCQuest in our sample setup). While creating room you can assign speaker and moderator to the room plus add layer of security by defining password to the room.

With both users and room ready the next step is optional and depends on the way users are going to use this chat. If your company already has a intranet site and you simply want to add chat features on it, then go to 'Code Generator' and follow four steps given there. The final step ('Generate It') generates code that can be embedded on to the web page running in the web server.

Usage

There are three ways in which this chat can be made available to users. From the 'Generate It', copy the direct chat link and give it to all users or install Apache Server and go to 'htdocs' folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs ) and copy 'client' folder to it (C:\Program Files (x86)\TopCMM\123 Flash Chat 9.3\client). Besides this, one can also embed the generated code on the web page.