I’m not sure this is the appropriate list – please feel free to send me somewhere else.

I’m a decent and robust IT guy, but new to video conferencing.  I’m looking for advice from folks who really know this stuff inside out (that’s you guys.)  ;-)

I would like to build a solution for the company, where our own private server acts as the relay/gatekeeper/stun/registrar (not sure which terms are technically right) so my Mac / Linux / Windows user clients can all communicate with each other via voice & video (and hopefully chat and file transfer too).  From anywhere on the internet.  I’m hopeful to have a company addressbook, so admins can add/remove users and users will automatically have that updated, and so on.

Basically I want to build a low-cost enterprise video conferencing system.  Commercial products are ok, provided they’re not crazy expensive (as some are).

I am looking at products like Xmeeting, openMCU, gnugatekeeper, and so on … I must admit some confusion about which ingredients are required, and then, some more confusion about pro/cons of the different varieties of each ingredient.

Any advice would be appreciated…  Thank you…