Recently for work I've been dealing with trying to build a robust IM server environment for the company I work for. The plan was to allow employees to chat with each other without the conversations ever leaving the company. Our hope was to also tie the system into the various public instant messaging systems (AIM/MSN/YIM) so that we could use the same system to communicate with customers.
After looking around at various offerings, the choices boiled down to a Jabber/XMPP based solution or a SIP/SIMPLE service like Microsoft OCS or Lotus Sametime. Since XMPP has more open source libraries for coding against it, we decided to go the XMPP route. Personally I was happy since the peer to peer nature of the SIP protocol introduces a few problems on our network.
Of course, deciding on XMPP doesn't really narrow things down too much. There are a number of open source XMPP/Jabber servers out there, and quite a few commercial ones as well.
We looked at Jabberd2, eJabberd and Jabber XCP.
As far as I can tell, Jabberd2 and Jabber XCP are very similar in codebase, at least judging by the configuration file format. The thing that the commercial Jabber XCP product provides is a nice web interface for configuring the service, a pair of supported clients (one Windows client, one web based client) as well as commercial support.
eJabberd was impressive. It is an open source application written in Erlang, which I wasn't familiar with. Erlang was a programming language created for distributed computing by Ericsson. On smaller installations, it can handle clustering without any form of external database. It automatically manages synchronization between nodes of the cluster.
Version 2.0 of ejabberd also included a very nice web interface for managing the service, and included an inpressive number of plugins. Configuring the service was very very easy.
At the end of the day, we ended up going with Jabber XCP. The main reason is the one feature that no one else was able to provide. The ability to really tie into the public IM systems, or at least one of them. Any XMPP server can tie into other XMPP services (like Google Talk), but Jabber XCP offered the ability to tie into AIM as well.
The majority of Jabber/XMPP servers offer transports for the various IM services. What these transports do is essentially allow you to log into your own AOL/MSN/etc account from within your IM client. So I may be myname@company.com within my company, but I would be logging into my gdfuego account on AIM.
Jabber XCP has a plugin (for additional per user cost), which allows you to actually use the same myname@company.com address within AIM itself. Unfortuantely MSN and YIM aren't an option at this time.
Right now I'm getting close to turning our new server live, and I've been hitting a number of snags, but that'll be a story for another day.
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