An Open Instant Messaging Platform called Jabber
Jabber is an open instant messaging technology that is used by several free IM services. There are several free clients available on this platform and several servers as well, if you intend to run one in your own organization.
Jabber was acquired by Cisco in September 2008.
XMPP
Jabber created the popular Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) which is used by several IM applications nowadays. XMPP is a set of open XML technologies for presence and real-time communication which was formalized by the IETF in 2002-2004.
The latest updates on XMPP is available on its website located at http://xmpp.org/
Your Own Hosted Jabber Servers
If you are not interested in connecting to public servers like Jabber.org (or others), you can host one within your own network. This gives you completely administrative control of your IM services.
An easy to use server is Openfire. There are several others as well. Openfire has been developed by Ignite Realtime and is available on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
(Click for larger image. Via Wikipedia)
Openfire provides a web-based administrative console. If you are installing on a Windows system, you have plugins that enable you to have LDAP authentication against your Windows Domain Controller. This simplifies your user management significantly. You can create logs of all information exchanged over the network.
Jabber Clients
The choice of Jabber clients is enormous. You will find one (or more) that suits your needs.
Some of the clients that I have used extensively are Spark (cross-platform) and Exodus (Windows). With a combination of Spark and Openfire, there is no need to add users to your client. Distribution Lists can be defined on the server and it gets automatically downloaded to the client. This is very useful in a corporate environment, especially for small and medium sized businesses.
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