A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry

Let's talk about Spark! - Every 4 minute time out

Posted: Oct 28, 2013

Okay seriously.. Spark, the new instant messenger for Nuance times out for inactivity every 4 minutes, obviously set that way by Nuance since the Spark instruction page on their own website says it times out every 20 minutes. Here's to the Nuance Police and their new "big brother" software!

Spark - MT

[ In Reply To ..]
You can change your Idle time in the settings. It's under preferences, then Login. You can change it to whatever you want.

Spark - whatsthedif

[ In Reply To ..]
Conspiracy theory much? Did you try changing it in preferences? It installs with a default.

Big brother software? - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
That's a laugh. Just change your idle time in your preferences.

Personally, I love Spark. It's heaps better than WorldClient.

Suspicious and just odd - CuriousMT

[ In Reply To ..]
I don't think this is some sort of conspiracy, as Spark is a legitimate IM client and we aren't being given some proprietary version of it. What does make me wonder if why we can't use a 3rd party client like Pidgin to connect, especially since it is just a Jabber IM client.

This is probably Greek to most of you, but basically this IM client works off a protocol called Jabber. It was created a long time ago as another IM client like Yahoo Messenger or AIM, etc. Pidgin is a program that allows you to have multiple protocols in 1 program. So I can be logged into my Yahoo IM account, my AIM account, and even Facebook Chat if I wanted (though I'd never get any work done). But it also supports Jabber, which is what Spark uses. Only, when I tried to use it, I was given an error saying that this client was supported and it was forbidden. But that was more about Nuance's control than anything else.

Did anyone else's Spark come pre-loaded with a whole bunch of people listed, about 1/2 of them in India? (tech support) Which makes me laugh at the old tech support outsourced to India joke!

I hate that we now have to manually log into our e-mail. ComAgent was bad enough, but at least you had a visual indicator that you had mail and could easily right-click and jump into the mail program without having to log in.

I'm not opposed to change, but there are just some fishy and weird things going on!

Huh? I've never heard of Spark. Is this new? nm - In the dark

[ In Reply To ..]
nm

It's replacing ComAgent, as of tomorrow! - CuriousMT

[ In Reply To ..]
nm

I don't know what that is either. Must not be used across the board? nm - In the dark

[ In Reply To ..]
n

sounds like Trillian - me

[ In Reply To ..]
It's been around since the 90s and uses multiple different programs all in one. The reason it's not used, because "they" didn't think of it. ComAgent was monitored, every word was logged by the higher ups, as is the email.

I think it looks more modern. I don't use IM much - anyway.

[ In Reply To ..]
Honestly, it doesn't matter to me. ComAgent never works, so we might as well try something new. And Spark has a better look than tired old ComAgent.

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