Is ICQ stable. Recommended alternatives?

[shmokes]

Working for the state of Utah pretty much makes you a Novell man (Utah company . . . thousands of jobs).  So I use GroupWise Messenger for IM.  But the community health center that has been part of one of my offices for the last five years or so is breaking off and going completely autonomous and will no longer have access to our servers.  I recommended ICQ, but the outside firm they have contracted with to do all their IT stuff told them that ICQ is unstable and recommended another product, made by the phone company of which they are a vendor (Mitel), which costs $30 per machine it is installed on.  My guess is that they are recommending this for one reason and one reason only - they are not in-house IT, and they will make a nice little profit by selling them a product rather than using the free (and probably superior) ICQ.

Thoughts?  Alternatives to ICQ?  I've never actually used it.  I'm just under the impression that it's a great application.  BTW, they want it for internal use only.  They don't even want users to have the option of IMing over the internet.

[AtomSmasher]

I haven't used icq in years, but it used to be very stable and a great chat client.  Right now I use trillian, which actually is just an IM client that combines my icq, aim, msn, and irc usernames into one interface and is probably not the type of thing your looking for. 

[EwJ]

Hear GAIM is good.
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/about.php

Look up 'open source instant messenger' to find
some good free alternatives?

[jfunk]

I use Miranda..  Also combines everything.  I especially like the plugins and extensibility (I can't live without tabbed panes...)

[shmokes]

I'm looking specifically for something that can be used internally only, without access to the outside world.  I currently use GAIM, but it's connecting to MSN, Yahoo and Groupwise Messenger servers.  Can any of those be set up so the user cannot use if for IMing the outside world?  That's what they are looking for.

[ChadTower]

You can probably find something that comes with a server you can run locally.  That would be the only real way to do that with a centralized IM system like AIM or ICQ.

[Angry_Radish]

May be a bit of overkill, but check out spark http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/index.jsp
 and the corresponding server wildfire http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/wildfire/
Excellent product for internal IM.