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As the guy has very specific needs with very strict requirements and exchange, perhaps Jabber.com products (now part of Cisco) are the way to go.

http://www.jabber.com/CE/JabberHome2

It is still XMPP, not a byte of non standard thing.

You can setup the thing completely in-house (you don't have to trust a contractor), or you can opt for a canned solution (for example Jabber, Inc., http://www.jabber.com/, they do provide everything for big and small companies, and are backed by Cisco). It uses SSL/TLS for secure connections both between clients and servers (C2S) and between separate servers (S2S), with full support for certificate authenticity checking, and even PGP/GPG encryption between the users, should they need to exchange really confifental data that even a rogue company server admin shouldn't be able to intercept (message encryption, pretty rare among proprietary protocols, but happens), or be sure that joe.the.boss@company.com is really Joe, their Boss, and not someone who just happend to "borrow" their laptop at the airport (signed presence, something, AFAIK, no other protocol provides). There are XMPP servers and clients for almost every platform possible, open-source or commercial, the protocol is open and approved by IETF for IM-style communication.

I won't give you any specific names, but I believe it wouldn't be very difficult to find a few *very* big companies using XMPP to prove to your boss that it's being used like this by big players in the industry.

And, frankly, that's the only open solution to your problem.

This has very little to do with Open Source. Jabber sells proprietary software http://www.jabber.com/ (NOT http://www.jabber.org/ ) which uses the XMPP system they developed (which used to be called the "Jabber" network, but changed its name when it was standardised).

XMPP is currently looked after by the XMPP Standards Foundation, so this doesn't affect the status of the standards, except that Peter Saint-Andre, who does a lot of the work mantaining, improving and drafting XMPP-based standards, works for Jabber. Despite the volume of his work, however, the XSF still has to approve the standards he writes (just like if I wrote a standard, or Google did, or Microsoft), so there's been no shift of power over XMPP.

All of the Open Source XMPP software out there will continue unaffected by this, except that there may be more users, developers and libraries available as Cisco spreads the technology.

Jabber claims to have military-grade security, and you can host your own server. Those two options alone should increase privacy and decrease man-in-the-middle attacks. If it's set up right, it shouldn't matter who controls the server (including the govt) as far as man-in-the-middle attacks are concerned.

The problem with GAIM and its encryption plug-ins are that they pretty-much only work with GAIM, and then only if you're using the same plug-in.

While the GAIM developers indicated a desire to work with Trillian when it was the only major encrypted-im game in town, I don't know why "they" don't implement a standard now, either de jure (JEP-0116, which admittedly isn't finalized) or more realistically at this point in time, de facto (as referenced in this message and used by several Jabber clients--e.g. Psi, Tkabber; even multi-protocol centericq and Kopete).

I haven't been following Pidgin development, so I don't know how easy it is to have a plug-in work for just one protocol, but the GAIM-only encryption methods seem counter-productive.

People, live with it. There are BILLIONS of text messages exchanged and there are hundreds of thousands of Agile Messenger "subscribers".

Real alerting thing is, there is no mention of "Jabber" (XMPP) in the article. No word at http://www.jabber.com/ or http://www.jabber.org/ too.

We are speaking about huge GSM companies here. One must start a petition, send some "people" to these companies IMMEDIATELY.

FYI, XMPP is the _official_ protocol of Internet 2. http://www.internet2.edu/

Enough with "I am so cool, who uses cell phone" attitude.

That's assuming it's even necessary to buy out Jabber. Likely, they'd just buy Jabber's server product, if the open-source server wasn't powerful enough to handle Google Talk's load. So they'd be Jabber Inc. customers, but not necessarily owners.

By the way, open-source Jabber development does not fall under Jabber Inc., but under the Jabber Software Foundation. Jabber Inc. sponsors the foundation and employs many of the core developers, though.

(disclaimer: somewhere in the back of my closet, I have old boxes of business cards from both Webb Interactive and Jabber, with my name on them)

Why not install/purchase a closed to outside jabber server/client system?

I don't think the ones below will have such a problem.

http://www.jabber.com/index.cgi?CONTENT_ID=34

IM, when used for business purposes is a good tool. Installing MS Messenger, is plain funny. Especially for a news agency which everything is critical.

As an aside, the FCS project is also making heavy use of Jabber. Word!

The problem is that the browsers are rendering the address correctly.

The HTML entity а != U+1072. It corresponds to U+0430 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A, which it seems most fonts render almost exactly identical to U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A.

It appears the problem is in RFC3491 "Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)" or RFC3292 "Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)". As I understand it, one of the processes these RFCs describe involve a sanitisation process to be carried out on domain names, that fixes cases where an attacker is using odd unicode control characters to make one character appear like another.

The problem is that these procedures overlooked U+0430 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A (and perhaps others?).

So I suggest flagging the address field with a red tint when such characters are discovered as a work around, until the clever people who write RFCs come up with a good idea of how to proceed.

More info on this blog, if you are interested.

Sorry formatting http://www.jabber.com/index.cgi?CONTENT_ID=460 It's not Skype it's Jabber

Bellsouth (a baby bell operating in the Southeast US) has a large Jabber server implementation. Press release. FAQ. One thing I wish they would do is provision the account and provide that info to new users as signup. You have to search their website or ask support to find out about it now.

To all my former colleagues: this is an historic day for Jabber, for instant messaging, and for the Internet. Congratulations!

Erbo - Former employee, Jabber Inc., Denver, CO

To answer your question, I am using Jabber Messenger 2.7.4.46. Copyright Jabber, Inc. Take a look at their website.

Well, you could always do XMPP pub/sub, as suggested here.

more consolidation of communications in the hands of a few small companies backing their horrid non-open standards.

We should get excited about small businesses (well small compared to AOL/Microsoft) like vonage and clients based on open protocols like Jabber

As a final problem won't this mean increased amounts of data being shunted onto the internet? Do we really need videoconferencing?

Oh well, maybe it'll stop people travelling as much.

Yes, I'm a misanthrope. I want people to stay home and watch the TV and shut up.

Financial Services Firms (Banks) have been pushing the use of Interoperable Instant Messaging. A number of the bigger players have decided to use Jabber/XMPP as a messaging backbone to connect to multiple systems.

See the work that the Financial Instant Messaging Association (FIMA) is trying to do for pushing interoperability. Check the Membership list to see the list of players. Some of the members have Jabber/XMPP deployments that are over two years old. Others have proprietary systems like Lotus' Sametime and are looking to vendors like Jabber, Inc. and Antepo to help them connect to each other. Unlike other software vendors, Jabber, Inc, and Antepo are working with the community, Jabber Software Foundation to promote not just open software but open protocols, which is a giant step forward. There are many different types of language bindings that the community has built. The Jabber Extension Process, keeps things moving forward in a truely open forum.

Financial Consortiums that used to use proprietary IM systems are switching over to XMPP. Reuters Messaging, will connect to Jabber/XMPP servers as well as AIM and MSN. To get an idea of how serious this is. Reuters was the first to get a real commercial agreement to be able to use the AIM network without using the AIM client.

This is truly a great day for the "open" world.

My only problem with Jabber is the lack of a good MacOS X client. The only mature client, Psi -- which I use on Windows -- is a Qt app hastily ported to MacOS, and so it neither looks nor behaves like a native app. Not a big problem for me, personally, but my colleagues refuse to go near it.

Only problem is, the free Jabber has a number of bugs, and isn't really built for an enterprise deployment. It lacks support for integration into existing directories and authentication structures, an easy mechanism for pre-populating buddy lists, and many other "corporate" features and services.

As it happens, most missing features are available in the commercial jabber.com release, which costs big big bucks.. thousands to tens of thousands for licensing, plus annual fees of around ten bucks per user.

You want professional, it costs a little: call Jabber, Inc. Or, contribute to the open source project to make it better.

Starting? Even without the anti-MS bias, you have to admit that altruism doesn't exist among companies. No air==dead people. Money is air to a company.

If MSN figures they can get more air this way, they will.

Duh.

MS only was nice so long as they got marketshare away from AIM. From this POV, it seems Jabber really needs to be rallied...

If I were to complete the analogy, I'd have to go back to pre-ISPs like Prodigy, which my family dropped because they were going to start charging us 25 cents per email/forum post. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? After all, emails from one Prodigy user to another used entirely Prodigy bandwidth, and so it's only fair for Prodigy to charge for them. So why aren't we paying a quarter an email today?

The reason they thought they could do that was because in the beginning Prodigy's email (like Compuserves, AOLs, and all the other online services') was limited to their own private system and ran exclusively on their own private servers, just like instant messaging does now. It was only upon contact with the internet that they joined together to be part of a distributed email system where they each only bore the costs of one half of any inter-system email exchange, and where anyone who didn't like their prices could switch to another provider without losing the ability to email anyone.

So why isn't anyone but Jabber using a system like that today? Is it because Microsoft and AOL have some sort of engineering amnesia, and can't figure out how to develop a communications protocol that doesn't involve One Giant Server Room to coordinate everything? Of course not. It's because, like I said, Microsoft and AOL want to have everyone's communication dependent on their One Giant Server Room, because then they have a hook that they can use to force ads on you, make you pay for premium services, and generally squeeze from you whatever the market will bear.

The problem is that in a competitive market where you had as many IM servers to choose from as email servers, the cost of an ISP providing instant messaging services would be infintesimal (significantly less than providing NNTP services, for example), the price that users pay would be a fraction of their ISP subscription, and many of those ISP subscriptions would go to other companies. That's not a revenue source for Microsoft or AOL, so that's not how Microsoft and AOL are designing their IM systems.

Unfortunately, since Jabber's a baby of the "open source" movement, it has a lot of very wealthy enemies (namely Microsoft) who will work very hard to ensure that it doesn't succeed.
They are instead backing the (IMO) inferior SIP/SIMPLE technology for IM.

Read The IM Standards Race for more information.

The XMPP server we provide from Jabber, Inc. provides the ability to log all messages that come in to and go out of the server. It is imperative that all traffic be logged at the server; some IM systems try to do without this by having the client send an extra copy of peer-to-peer messages off to a compliance server, but there are lots of ways that second connection could be defeated.

Typically in a corporate environment, clients will connect using SSL or TLS, so the wire traffic is encrypted, but the messages themselves are plaintext for easy of retrieval from the archive solution. It is possible to do end-to-end encryption, but in these environments you would need a key escrow solution, which is more trouble that people seem to want at this point.

• http://www.jabber.org.au
• http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid/13 152
• http://www1.hurgh.org:81/
• http://support.jabber.com/jimhelpfiles/Shared_Grou ps.htm

But don't believe them. Since you are reading Slashdot you can handle reading the real specs. XMPP is very reasonable and SIP is nuts. Just trying reading the spec.

It seems Microsoft has backed SIP/SIMPLE. This is probably a political move. They cannot back XMPP since that's their "enemy". Of course, they'd prefer it if every just used MSN. What a horrible world that would be. In fact SIP/SIMPLE is so bad and far away from implementation that its good for them. And delay towards standardization is good for the company that owns the desktop and installs their IM client there.

I could never imagine using MSN -- every thing you type going thru a server in Redmond! They'd also monitor when you took a coffee break.

Because I have insominia...

http://www.jabber.org.au/

http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid/13 152

http://www1.hurgh.org:81/

http://support.jabber.com/jimhelpfiles/Shared_Grou ps.htm

And to prove I'm not karma whoring.... I'll post anonymously.

If you go to Jabber.org you'll see there has been a lot of large investments/installations of the Jabber protocol (usually from Jabber Inc.) recently, from companies like Intel, France Telecom, EarthLink, etc. So I think headway is being made, but there aren't large annoucements being made that Joe AOL user would notice. And maybe that is where the problem is. When a city government I was contracting for was looking for an instant messenger solution I instantly suggested Jabber, since I had worked with both the open-source Jabberd and Jabber Inc servers. Fortunately, with Jabber Inc being a local company (I live in Denver) getting them to come out and show-off their wares wasn't a difficult thing to do. But, I'm sure that outside of my boss at the time, very few, if any, of the city's IT people were aware of Jabber and were all probably thinking AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, whenever the topic of IM came up.

It could be very popular with Win32 users if someone sold support and a retail box.

See jabber.com for a commercial company selling service and support for jabber.

I run JIM(for windows) (from www.jabber.com )and I have my ICQ account set up through a "gateway". This cuts down on the need for multiple clients. As of right... now the server I login to supports, ICQ,AIM,MSN,YAHOO as well as the standard JabberIM protocol.

I have recommended to all my friends to use Jabber as well as the JIM client for windows and the Psi client for Linux. these both seem to be the most stable so far.

-----
DISCLAIMER: IANAL,IANAB,YMMV,INMF(it's not my fault)

• Open Protocol with open specifications, XML everywhere :)
• Easily extended protocol.
• Server side everything, including contact lists.
• A multitude of clients, for windows, Linux, and other OS's
• Server side Transports so you can talk to people on other networks as if they were normal jabber members. This even includes ICQ's ability to send SMS's. Transports exist for at least ICQ,MSN,Yahoo,AIM,IRC,SMTP, I even wrote a transport to talk to my Wiki.
• A simple client protocol that can be easily implemented on simple devices (Cellphones etc), most of the hardwork is done on the servers.
• Conferencing, multiuser chat.
• Lotsa other stuff I don't use.

• The Jabber Software Foundation
• Jabber Studio - A sourceforge like site for jabber projects.
• Jabber Inc - A company making money on working on Jabber solutions for other companies.
• Gabber - a (very nice IMHO) GTK client for Jabber.
• Psi - a Jabber client for the KDE people.

Doh! Forgot to do the link right' so here are the important ones: The community side and the commercial side.

What about Jabber, trying to oust the current monopolizing standards..

Jabber is not only the product of one company but the collective effort of many Open Source developers and companies: Jabber servers are available for linux and , and windows.

Clients are available for any platform.

You can choose your preferred server or client and they will work with each other!!

france telecom has invested $7mio in jabber.com.
press release talks about mobile and voice communications.

Man. I sure wish chefmonkey was around to see this. He was touting how SIMPLE was the answer to the problem of interop only a few weeks ago. And not, AOL's not even going to play along. Guess he'll have to find a new party line.

From the Jabber from, you have a new push in the IETF, a *working* server-to-server implementation, and multiple competing implementations. (1, 2, 3)

What is the protocol lacking again? As I recall, there were some security concerns, but these issues are being dealt on, including integrating SASL support into the protocol. So why aren't people using this? There is a lot of momentum behind Jabber right now, and I think it'd be silly if companies didn't at least consider it as a solution.

If you're curious, you can always Jabber me. My JID is rynok@jabber.com. Add me to your roster and ask me any questions you like. I can't promise I'll have all the answers, but I'll certainly do my best.

Client side apps are already doing the job fairly well:

Everybuddy

There are others for the non-Linux crowd too. (Feel free to list a few... I'm busy at work.)

(And there's always Jabber.)

The only problem is the intentional changing of AIM, MSN protocols solely for the purpose of "breaking" third-party clients.

If you were looking for a solution to the problem of how to gain the benefits of IM technologies without the time wasting aspects of external IM buddies (friends, spouses), you should set up a local Jabber server and port block the other services. (Great free server and clients, and a commercial support arm as well.)

I own a medium sized ISP near Microsoft in Redmond and we use Jabber intra-company all day long. Our technical support center is 50 miles North of our main office, so the techs, admins, accounting, and sales staff have found that it is much easier than trying to call each other, since they are always on the phone with customers.

What your talking about here is a particular implementation of a Jabber server, jabberd, not Jabber in general (people often confuse this point). You can do some minimal clustering with the jabberd-1.4 series, but probably not the kind of reliability that your looking for or that jabber.com has built into their server.

Jabber is an open system/protocol, anyone can build new servers/clients/etc with whatever features and extensions they want, including building it on/with xmlblaster. Jabberd is also an open source project that your welcome to help with (farming/clustering is a frequent need and I suspect that it will be a large part of the jabberd-1.5 development series).

Makes sense ... its not like you can adopt IRC, Y!, AOL/ICQ or MSN as your messaging platform.

Like the article says ... "Jabber is one of the first companies to integrate wireless Instant Messaging using the robust, open APIs (Application Programming Interface) of Oracle9i Application Server, providing a solution for wireless carriers to integrate the IM application into their mobile enterprise portals and deliver messaging content to wireless devices. Jabber messages are XML fragments routed through the Jabber server to Oracle9i Application Server. Because the messages are already XML-based, Oracle9i Application Server can simply deliver them in the markup language of the intended recipient's mobile device. "

I should think that by now we would have seen the emergence of a new application/service to bridge the gnutella/kazaa P2P networks perhaps along with some other, smaller networks much like how Jabber did with Instant messenging.
I'd be surprised if no one had as of yet reverse-engineered the Kazaa-developed protocols, and moving from there to a unified application appears on face to be simple. I was thinking about this as I was about to download Kazaa (having already downloaded the new morpheus and being less than impressed with it) and wondering how affected the Kazaa P2P network is since the morpheus user base departure.
A single, unified P2P application would obviously have a huge number of advantages (hopefully no spyware/trojans/etc) and with luck, would be GPL'd for added amusement. If anyone's interested in building the lagest P2P network in history (and making porn easier to find and download) please feel free; but don't expect it from me anytime soon, as my time is currently about as limited as my intellect.

----

http://www.jabber.com/about/contact.shtml

info@jabber.com

http://www.jabber.com/about/contact.shtml

info@jabber.com

Spread it to the windows world too?
The "official" jabber client (official meaning the one by the people at jabber.com is released for windows only. Actually, the only reason I prefer Gabber is that it looks prettier (IMO), but I wouldn't count that as a usability issue :)

An OPEN IM standard would be nicer. I've been playing the "What's new" in IM this week, trying to get away from ICQ. Jabber looks really promising, but most of the clients seem to have a ways to go or have bought into Gnome heavily. If you're a WindowMaker or AfterStep fan and have run docked licq, you know what I'm looking for.

The important feature of Jabber is not so much the protocol and it's XML underpinnings, but the fact that the server is open source as well. This allows IM to become a service anyone can offer in addition in to email, web space, etc.

Given AOL's track record, I don't see AIM doing anything other than embracing others IM systems protocol's while defending their own to the hilt. Too many ad dollars at stake.

It has been greatly commented that companies tend to depend on external IM (ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, you name it). I'm amazed that noone has mentioned Jabber! That's one server you can deploy (*NIX only for the moment, Win experimental) and it provides some nice features for the business (and jabber.com deals with business); encryption, automatic 'buddies' (so everyone gets as a default everyone in their department) and it's very light and available in nearly all platforms, with a nice variety of clients.

It's quite useful that you can run your own server, no?

If you're using ICQ in Windows, there are a couple of alternative clients you might be interested in. The first is Miranda, which looks like the ICQ client did back before it got big and bloated. The second is Jabber, which I've not really looked at, but seems to be aiming to glob support for all the other main instant messaging systems into one client, together with it's own system.

Hum her hah. I'm a bit divided over this.

MY data is one SOMEONE ELSE's machine.

A lot of my friends use MSN Messenger and Hotmail. My friends that used to use only ICQ are now either MSN and ICQ users, or use MSN exclusively now.

Why I mention this is that MSN Messenger and ICQ has different views of where to store data. MSN is all on the server, while ICQ is all on the user's machine. Different perspectives on computing.

They have their merit, and Messenger seems to be the favourite. On ICQ I would continually hear ... I'm about to format my computer. Send me a message in an hour if you want to be on my new list. Aw, but I deleted my old list, send me a message so I can add you again.

Messenger doesn't have this trouble because MSN looks after your list. I go to a cybercafe 12 hours drive away and PACHOW my list downloads and its just like being at home, or just like using my mate's computer, or just like using my Dad's computer.

Although I like ICQ because I can hack the client and add people to my list without their authorisation, there are strong reasons why server-side is good for some applications.

No no no I will not store my MP3s or private documents on a third parties computer. Driveway.com and iDrive both bit me when they terminated their file sharing.

But you can have my MSN Messenger list. I don't mind.

Basically, Jabber.com wants to cater to corporations who want to use Jabber and also employ several of the core hackers on the Jabber.org (Open Source) Jabber project. There are also other companies forming which will be involved in the creation of Jabber and Jabber-related services/projects, so Jabber.com won't have absolute control over the project. (And it doesn't currently anyway, there are many of us (myself included) who work on Jabber-related things but are not employed by Jabber.com)

Well, it does have them. There is a Win32 platform, and Java works on MacOS.