Jabber

I spent most of today setting up a Jabber server for our company group.

I mentioned a few months ago to my bosses that perhaps MSN Messenger wasn’t exactly what we needed for in-company communication: we have no control, it goes through someone else’s servers, and has advertisements (although you can get around that with other clients at the expense of reliability).

My boss obviously came to the same conclusion, because he sent out an email the other day soliciting recommendations for an alternative. I suggested something using the Jabber protocol because:

• I have used it before
• It’s an open protocol
• It uses Unicode and therefore supports multiple languages (really important for us as we produce a website in four languages, only one of which uses the Roman alphabet)
• There are many different servers and clients available

As a result, I ended up installing jabberd (version 2) on a server today, getting it up and working, and writing an instruction manual explaining how to get started using the Psi client.

We’re going to try it out over the next few days to see if it does everything we need.