We haven't talked enough about ICEcore Conference in the past and that needs to change.  The reasons historically have been that ICEcore's enterprise versions did not sell Conference by itself.  The model for enterprise has been Teaming and Teaming + Conferencing.  You couldn't get a Conference license without Team.  Unfortunately, this hasn't changed, however, it is time to give credit where credit is due and help everyone understand what Conference is and what it can do even when not using the Team component.

So what is ICEcore Conference and what does it do?  This may be self-evident but Conference is a service that provides meeting capability combined with desktop and application sharing.  It also exposes an external API and can be integrated with other systems and services just like we've done with ICEcore Team.  This allows presence and meeting capabilities to be added to just about any application you can think of.  Conference features several features to help manage its meetings including a Meeting Archiver to record sessions, an Email Service that sends iCal meeting requests, and also an Address Book that keeps track of contact information for the people you contact frequently.  All of this AND its open source.  What could be better?  ... Well since you asked

ICEcore Conference has also extended the Pidgin IM client with our own protocol handler so that presence is broadcast and also meetings can be created and scheduled right from the Pidgin client.

Conference is made up of multiple components and uses an XMPP router to handle messaging between the components. The following picture depicts the architecture of Conference.  Note that most of the components support multiple instances so that clustering and load balancing is built in to all the different components.

We currently support 3 different platforms for the Conference server.  One for Windows, one for RHEL4, and another for SLES10.  We anticipate having the source tarball available soon so that builds can be targeted at other platforms as well.  The client software to manage meetings is bundled into the server and is available for download and install once you have the server up and running.

I touched on this earlier but its worth mentioning again, Conference can be integrated with almost any other software so that presence and real-time meeting functionality can be added to your application using our external API.  This is one thing we would like to see other projects start doing.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a Buddy portlet in JBoss that shows presence and allows meeting creation with the touch of the mouse?  You could do the same with SugarCRM if you wanted to.  Anytime someone's name is displayed it could also include a presence icon you could click to start an instant meeting.  This is what real-time collaboration is all about.  Come and try it out and get started helping us make it the best conferencing platform out there.