Welcome to HelpIM

HelpIM is an open source (GPL) application designed for psycho-social counselling by instant messaging. Key benefits are:

  • client can contact with almost any browser, no additional software is needed
  • designed with security and privacy in mind
  • highly extensible and configurable
  • easy interface for staff members
  • easy management
  • possibilities for quality control and reviewing of counseling
  • overview of management information

Among the configurable functionalities are:

  • questionnaires before and after the chat for the client
  • questions after the chat for the staff-member
  • registration-system
  • advanced statistics
  • group chat
  • typing notification
  • smiley's
  • sending / receiving urls
  • restoring a chat after a broken connection
  • ... and many more

Use

Right now HelpIM is the most used software for psycho-social counseling chats in the Netherlands. HelpIM is maintained by the e-hulp.nl foundation. Its current maintainer is Winfried Tilanus.

Documentation

End user documentation

The documentation on HelpIM is mainly in Dutch and mainly aimed at end-users. Most documentation is custom-written for a several specific sites. Technical documentation is more limited. The documentation can be found here.

Documentation for system administrators

Some information for system administrators can be found here.

Developers documentation

A read-only subversion repository can be found at http://www.helpim.org/subversion/. Feel free to do a subversion checkout and take a look at the source. More information for developing on HelpIM can be found here.