Several months ago Novell started the project named Banter. It’s being called the next generation collaboration client. Think of it as software that combines all of your online “Web 2.0″ services along with chat, video, and voice into your contact management system.
Banter’s focus is on collaboration with people. One method of collaboration is IM. Banter will initially be focused on the big three: Video, Audio, and Text chats. Banter’s user experience will be around people (not buddies from specific services) and all the ways you work with them. Future collaboration methods may include email, blogs, photo sharing, whiteboarding, teaming, web conferencing, etc. Banter’s goal is not to implement all of these services and technologies, but bring them together so the data around the people you collaborate with is all brought together.
The chat window can handle text, audio, and video chat. Text chat is always available so you can send links or information while having and audio or video chat. Audio and Video can be started and stopped at any time during a chat. The project is focused on providing a simple quality experience for the end user. Banter is built on the telepathy project, and thus is not trying to re-invent the wheel but provide collaborative user experience on existing frameworks.
Banter is available on the openSUSE build service and is currently in alpha, the latest release being 0.1.10 with GTalk support. This project is being done in the open from the very beginning. In fact, if you want to see what we are doing, you can visit the Banter wiki at http://banter-project.org.
Banter in openSUSE 10.3 Â | Â Â Packages on the build server