#Jabber

Continuing my current fixation about Jabber and Jabber related stuff (it all started with this post about how Google is openning up Google Talk to talk with other Jabber based servers), there is a good article up on O’Relly’s OnLamp.com about the pros and cons of a Company-Wide Instant Messaging solutions as well as how to setup Jabberd 2.x to do just that.

It’s really worth the read for people that are trying to figure out how to utilize an IM solution in their company while still retaining a high degree of security.

I promised in the previous post about Google Talk’s support for federation to check what open source Jabber servers supports the DialBack protocol described in RFC 3920 used by Google Talk server to talk to other Jabber server.

Well… it seems that the dialback protocol is supported by all server listed here and a bunch of other non open source servers not listed there.

This is a good thing, but it seems the dialback protocol is not encrypted like the other TLS and SASL server-to-server protocols. On the other hand all other IMs today are not encrypted by default so privacy issues regarding this are legitimate as to the rest of the IMs available.

A while back I posted a request/hope that Google Talk will open up to AOL using one of the Jabber bridges.

I also secretly hoped (meaning, I forgot to blog about it) that since Google Talk uses Jabber, they will open up its federation abilities and enable everying Google Talk user to communicate with any other Jabber user (providing that that user supports the necessary XMPP spec that Google Talk uses, which I still don’t know if it is one of the common ones, but I’ll check that up).

I’m sure you all have heard by now that Google and AOL have signed a deal in which part of it is to enable Google Talk and AIM users to communicate with each other.

Google Talk is based on the open XMPP (Jabber) standard which has built in abilities to work with gateways that enables this protocol to communicate with other protocols.

I just hope Google will use some of the Jabber/AIM bridges such as AIM/ICQ-Transport to make this thing work.