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Ask HN: Alternatives to Skype/Lync

7 points by flukus ↗ HN
Since a recent upgrade to office 2013 (we're cutting edge like that) skype has gone from buggy to unusable much of the time. From various comments I've seen online we aren't alone in this, so are they any good alternatives?

Our requirements would be:

* Internally Hosted (but working in our offices world wide)

* one-one and many-many text messaging, permanent chat rooms would be nice

* voice chat

* desktop screen sharing

* Ideally capable of presentations (would love to get rid of webex as well)

* AD integration

* Preferably open source

* Preferably cross platform

12 comments

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ksherlock
Richard Stallman suggest Ekiga, Mumble, or Jitsi
flukus
Ekiga - Doesn't look like it does desktop sharing, or at least the don't advertise it. Hasn't been updated in 4 years and the reliance on GTK probably limits it's future for cross platform.

Mumble - looks geared for gaming, not professionals.

Jitsi - Kind of promising but no info on setting up a server, also java based and the startup time you'd expect with that.

Gustomaximus
If you want to stay in the MS universe you could have a look at their Teams product. Is better than Skype/Lync.

Not open source/internally hosted though.

And dont feel too bad about office 2003. 4 years ago I worked for a large & well know company was using a more than decade old version of Lotus notes...

flukus
From a quick look, it looks as though teams is built on top of skype rather than as a replacement.
michalpt
There is a new "Skype killer": https://beam.ai/ (currently in beta) which looks amazing and can also be easily integrated into Slack.
pyb
By the way, Skype and Lync("Skype for business") are different products with a different codebase. But I find Lync to be the worst of the two.
flukus
If MS want to poison the skype brand I won't stand in there way.
jetti
We use Cisco Jabber at work. It integrates with WebEx as well as AD, which is nice. You can see when people are in a webex meeting as well as when they are presenting.
MikeTV
Jabber here too. Works decently well, except they run URLDecode four times on all messages. Makes chatting about URL encoding errors very difficult.
flukus
My experiences with cisco software has made me vow to never install cisco software again.
lfx
What about Amazon Chime? Does anybody have real experience yet?