This is awesome:
http://getkaiwa.com/
I've encouraged the use of Slack at the office in my last two jobs because despite it being proprietary it has a really nice interface and it did support IRC (and XMPP at some point). I viewed it as the lesser evil when the only choices were Google Hangouts, Skype or Lync.
Kaiwa is a web-based interface to XMPP and it looks modern and it actually looks very similar to Slack. The hard part now is convincing management to deploy an XMPP server ;)
It's nice to see good looking and easy to use free software; it goes a long way towards convincing others to switch.
I may have to deploy my own XMPP server just to check out Kaiwa. Anyone have recommendations for an easy to setup XMPP server? Something that takes under 30min to configure?