Jabber Extensible Communications Platform

Jabber has expanded from its open-source roots into a powerful platform for corporate IM. You can use Jabber's own Windows- or Web-based clients, or any of dozens of third-party clients that support Jabber's Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to communicate with servers inside or outside your corporate firewall or on the Jabber public IM network. Jabber's support for persistent conference rooms with client-side filtering makes for a convenient way to use IM in corporate knowledge management as well as person-to-person IM.

Auditing and Reporting: Jabber, Inc.'s solution offers auditing and logging capabilities out of the box along with hooks for third party or in-house tools.

Security: Clients and servers can use SSL encryption to secure communications, and administrators can restrict access to their servers.

IM Features: The client is more bare bones than those of competitors, but we like its custom views, which let you aggregate and filter messages from multiple group sessions and monitor various data feeds (either human- or machine-generated) in real time. The client also supports ad hoc and persistent group conferencing, and it integrates with Microsoft NetMeeting for rich-media collaboration.

Interoperability and Integration: The product doesn't interoperate directly with public IM networks. Since Jabber's XMPP is a simple and extensible XML-based protocol, it should easily be able to integrate presence and messaging capabilities into your existing applications or portals.

Management and Administration: Jabber servers function the same way e-mail servers do and can be deployed in a similar fashion.