As great as forums and news groups are, nothing beats the ‘let me bounce this idea off of you’ right now repertoire like realtime chat. As a community we should have some easy way to be able to talk to each other, right? Instant messanger programs are awesome, but there’s that whole ‘adding contact-let’s wait to be approved-who are you?-I’m so and so-Oh ok’ rigamarole that we have to go through first - so what to do?

Well, why not IRC? I’ve created a channel on the Freenode network called #SCOM for us to chat about OpsMgr and whatever else. Why FreeNode? Well, the PowerShell folks have a channel there, so I figure it’s as good as any for me to hang out.

So in your favorite IRC client, just connect to server irc.Freenode.Net and /join #SCOM. If you’re looking for a client, here’s a whole list of them for Windows - I use mIrc & Pidgin currently. I’ve also embedded a java chat room below so you can popin whenever you’d like (Note to self: Pay to register chat room software)