MSN is a messaging protocol that allows "live" text conversations with other Internet users on a wide variety of operating systems. It also provides other facilities such as file transfer, and multi-user conversations.

Parmesan is a free MSN client for RISC OS, and was first publicly released in September 2007. Full file transfer facilities were added in November 2007, and last month saw a host of new features including coloured messages, auto-idle, and more. Parmesan won the runner up prize for Best Non-Commercial Program in the Drobe 2007 awards.

Christian Ludlam is Parmesan's author, and will be demonstrating the software live, as well as talking a little about its development and plans for future features.

Parmesan can be downloaded from http://parmesan.recoil.org/

The commercial alternative to Parmesan is Grapevine from R-Comp, so we will also be taking a look at this, and probably at RISC OS clients for other online communication such as IRC.

In short, if your RISC OS internet usage so far has mainly been limited to email, newsgroups and web browsing, this meeting should give plenty of ideas as to the extra facilities you could be taking advantage of.