I have been given the task of determining presence for all employees.  For those that do not know what presence is, basically it is determining where you are at and what your status is.  Are you at work?  Are you on your cell phone traveling?  Are you at home? If you are at work are you available?  My task is not to track location as much as providing status of employees while at work.

Those that have gone down this road before know what technology I am thinking of, Jabber.  Jabber is best known as “the Linux of instant messaging” — an open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo.  Under the hood, Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols and technologies that enable any two entities on the Internet to exchange messages, presence, and other structured information in close to real time.

I started to research servers that use the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) or Jabber.  Quickly I found Wildfire by Jive Software.  Wildfire was a synch to install.  I installed it on a Windows XP workstation and used several clients to test with, including Gaim, Spark, Trillian Pro, and Fire.  So far testing has gone well.  I have seven people testing and chatting on the internal service.

There are many benefits to running an internal Jabber server.  Jabber technologies offer several key advantages:

• Open — the Jabber protocols are free, open, public, and easily understandable; in addition, multiple implementations exist for clients, servers, components, and code libraries.
• Standard — the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has formalized the core XML streaming protocols as an approved instant messaging and presence technology under the name of XMPP, and the XMPP specifications have been published as RFC 3920 and RFC 3921.
• Proven — the first Jabber technologies were developed by Jeremie Miller in 1998 and are now quite stable; hundreds of developers are working on Jabber technologies; there are tens of thousands of Jabber servers running on the Internet today, and millions of people use Jabber for IM.
• Decentralized — the architecture of the Jabber network is similar to email; as a result, anyone can run their own Jabber server, enabling individuals and organizations to take control of their IM experience.
• Secure — any Jabber server may be isolated from the public Jabber network (e.g., on a company intranet), and robust security using SASL and TLS has been built into the core XMPP specifications.
• Extensible — using the power of XML namespaces, anyone can build custom functionality on top of the core protocols; to maintain interoperability, common extensions are managed by the Jabber Software Foundation.
• Flexible — Jabber applications beyond IM include network management, content syndication, collaboration tools, file sharing, gaming, and remote systems monitoring.
• Diverse — a wide range of companies and open-source projects use the Jabber protocols to build and deploy real-time applications and services; you will never get “locked in” when you use Jabber technologies.