Many places I've worked at end up having an internal irc server running on a random debian machine. Works well and there's plenty of clients available
Yeah, that seems to be the way to go but I'd love a less geeky, n00b-friendly solution (pretty sure it doesn't exist but I can't figure out why. Is that so hard to code/achieve?).
Compared to setting up a jabber server and getting clients for it, and rooms etc. an irc server is simple. :-)