The open-source IM movement stands to gain from a new, graphical front-end for installing and configuring the JabberD server.
Released by the not-for-profit Jabber Software Foundation this week, the JabberD Quickstart executable represents a big step for the open-source JabberD server, the most widely deployed open-source IM server.
JabberD relies on the XML-based Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), supporters of which have been struggling to get traction in enterprises, amid heavily entrenched competition from the likes of IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Exchange, a host of startups, and the public IM networks -- who are busily promoting enterprise offerings of their own.
One way in that the JSF hopes to appeal to corporations is by addressing a lingering limitation in the server distribution: JabberD had previously been configured and maintained only through a command-line interface and a hand-edited XML configuration file.
And that, the group felt, wasn't going to cut it with sysadmins.
"Quickstart came about to address the needs of people who were not necessarily comfortable with the usual installation methods for the open-source JabberD server," said Peter Saint-Andre, executive director of the Jabber Software Foundation.
"Some admins, even on Linux, were asking for a more 'user-friendly' installation and configuration interface," he said. "Some corporate admins may know a bit of Linux/Unix, but they're not at the guru level of building applications from source and such, so this provides an interface that they can use to install, configure, and manage the server -- starting and stopping the server, adding and deleting users, that kind of thing."
Already, the Linux-based offering is seeing new interest from users. Less than a month old, the release has been downloaded about 3,500 times. It's difficult to know how many installations have resulted from the downloads, the group says, because they tend to be behind the corporate firewall. (A survey conducted earlier on the group's site, Jabber.org, found that about 30 percent of users had deployed JabberD in intranet settings.)
In addition to the current Linux deployment, the group is also working on versions for other platforms.
Despite the benefits of a front-end and the early signs of rapid adoption, the JSF acknowledges that other work needs to be done on JabberD before its open-source IM becomes truly palatable to corporate-types -- work that includes beefing up security features, documentation, and public IM gateways.
"Security is in the works through our work with the IETF," Saint-Andre said, referring to the recent creation of an XMPP Working Group within the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet's leading standards body. "Jabber is pretty secure already, but we're beefing that up even more. Documentation is always a sore point, since so few people in the open-source community are interested in documentation. However, we have a major translation effort underway for documentation, so we will have our docs in many major languages soon."
He conceded that the public IM interoperability is a bigger hurdle -- due to the necessity of support from IM networks like America Online's AIM and Yahoo! Instant Messenger. (For the present, IM gateways are handled by generally unsanctioned XML transports to the public IM servers.)
Still, Saint-Andre added, "the admin interface is probably the biggest thing. Everyone loves an interface."
Yet there also remains some shortcomings with Quickstart. For one thing, it's not fully extensible -- meaning that admins can't use it to add public IM gateways and other features. (Admins could do so through the usual means, however -- by editing the config file.)
"It's not fully extensible ... But it makes it easy to get up and running. It's a step in the right direction," Saint-Andre said. "Quickstart is a good start, but probably not flexible enough to do it all."
There's hope here as well. The group is wagering that the second version of JabberD, dubbed JabberD2, will offer a full-featured administrative interface not long after its launch, which could be in several months. JabberD2, currently in alpha, is also expected to offer greater scalability and extensibility.
At any rate, the development comes as the second big development in recent weeks for XMPP supporters' effort to gain a bigger foothold in the corporate arena.
Jabber, Inc. -- one of the firms offering a commercialized version of XMPP technology -- earlier this month received an investment from the venture capital arms of Intel Corp. and France Telecom, an earlier investor. The investments are likely to mean that Jabber receives help on the technology and marketing fronts from the two companies.
FT, which is deploying Jabber, Inc.-based technology in its mobile units, also agreed to purchase more licenses from the firm.
Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.
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