As 2006 comes to an end and 2007 looms on the horizon, Instant Messaging Planet takes a look back at the last 12 months and looks ahead to what you can expect in the new year.

Below, we break down the trends in instant messaging into five key areas: XMPP, Interoperability & Federation, Presence & Integration, IM-to-VoIP, and Security, Compliance & Archiving.

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
Google was a major contributor to the growing popularity of XMPP. Back in January, Google announced that Google Talk was now an open federation product, allowing chat capabilities with users on other XMPP services.  Jive Software became a significant player this year with the release of its XMPP-driven enterprise IM server, Wildfire 3.1. This recent release incorporated transports (Wildfire Release Puts IM Interop Back in the Mix) that enabled communication with anyone on proprietary IM networks, including AOL. So far, as we near the end of 2006 we haven't heard too much from The Jabber Foundation, which doesn't particularly favor the transport solution as it undermines XMPP as a stand-alone protocol. 

Rounding out the year in support of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, IBM announced XMPP support in Lotus Sametime 7.5.  In the midst of announcements backing the XMPP protocol, Microsoft rolled out a new "private" beta version of its Office Communications Server this month. While it supports SIP/SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) as its core protocol, Microsoft has said it would consider adding XMPP support if demand for it develops.

Jingle, a set of open XMPP protocol extensions that allow clients to initiate multimedia IM features, such as including voice and video chat, made its debut in 2005, but became more of an emerging trend in 2006.

Throughout the year we've seen development strengthen in the video and voice areas and we're seeing more implementation of Jingle, primarily in the consumer IM market. Again, Google made a huge to-do about supporting Jingle, but what they  implemented is actually its own subset of  the Jingle specification.

Interoperability & Federation
Federated IM networks and cross-platform communications definitely makes the trend list for this year in instant messaging. Google started things off in January with its open federation project and IBM ended the year by announcing federation with users of Yahoo, AOL and Google messaging platforms in the latest Lotus Sametime release (Sametime Cuts Federation Deal with Yahoo, AIM and Google). While IBM's offering doesn't include Microsoft, it does connect Sametime users to the majority of IM users worldwide.

In between Google and IBM came Jive's Wildfire 3.1 release (Wildfire Release Puts IM Interop Back in the Mix), impacting IM federation with the inclusion of transports.

Jive may have treaded into murky waters by offering the AOL transport in place of joining AOL's Enterprise Federation Program, which is said to be available at a start up price of $100,000 plus per-seat licensing fees. AOL hasn't yet broken its protocol to remove the interoperability made available by Jive's XMPP transports, but many will be keeping an eye on this IM connection in the new year.

While the fees for AOL's federation program are deterring some, Omnipod and Parlano are two enterprise instant messaging providers that did announce federated connectivity to the AOL Messaging Network this year.

On the Microsoft side of things, they announced in July that Live Communications Server will also provide an interface for IM users to federate IM and incorporate presence systems by allowing third-party developers to enable inter-federation.

Today AOL Instant Messenger still dominates the consumer market, but in the spirit of competition, Microsoft's Windows Messenger and Yahoo Messenger pledged to connect their networks in 2005 and the marriage certificate was finally signed between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger with Voice in July, creating a community of roughly 350 million accounts.

Presence & Integration
One of the biggest buzzwords in the instant messaging industry for 2006 is presence, and, of course, integration as they often go hand-in-hand. Basically, the IM client will let you see which co-worker is away, on the phone, who is in a meeting, plus connect immediately with other users based on their presence status. Microsoft brought presence to the forefront with Microsoft's Live Communication Server (LCS), which combined Office Communicator and Web access, despite IBM's earlier IM offering bundled in Exchange. Sun also offers presence through its Java System Instant Messaging, which is based on XMPP protocol, by integrating Sun's Messaging, Portal and Calendar servers.

In its most basic form, presence is also offered in consumer IM platforms as well. Google rolled out basic presence and chat archiving to its Gmail and Talk products, and AOL jumped in with its free AOL Presence service in October of this year. Yahoo also announced plans for integration of Yahoo Messaging into its Yahoo mail service, which is similar to the approach Google is taking with its IM and e-mail services. 

Much of the newly announced communications between clients, such as that with SameTime, is due in part to the growing interest in SIP/SIMPLE , which enables cross-platform messaging among the various clients by providing presence awareness allowing  you to see if users on other platforms are online. In some applications this presence-awareness is used to enable document sharing and to use other collaboration tools. The idea of a Web 2.0 world where we can use this type of communication for sharing and presence awareness lends weight to an increase of SIP/SIMPLE support and growing support for IM presence capabilities to be integrated into the applications themselves.

IM-to-VoIP
2006 was a year for the convergence between instant messaging and VoIP.  Driven in part by the increasing voice support options offered in Skype, followed by announcements from Google, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AOL, the IM-to-Voice trend, dubbed Voice 2.0, flourished this year.  In mobile IM communications companies such as Talkster (IM Watch: Talkster Makes IM-to-Phone Connection) heading up new services that allow mobile phone users to place free calls to IM contacts using clients with voice services.

While the IM-to-Voice trend is a big hit in consumer markets, we expect to see it rolling over to the workplace.  What we haven't seen this year, but expect to see tackled in 2007 is the need for unified security systems to address the storage and archiving issues surrounding the adoption of  voice messages through IM.

We also should expect to see more spam and security threats arise in the new year as more IM-to-VoIP telephony services are rolled out. The 2006 Annual Security Report by MessageLabs cautions that VoIP threats will also emerge in force in 2007. In its report it claims 2006 provided a playground for spammers using SPIT (Spam for Internet Telephony) to learn the technology and next year we'll see more of those spammers spoofing telephone numbers of genuine businesses and financial institutions to make their bogus calls.

Security, Compliance & Archiving
Despite some of the technological advances being made in the IM industry this year, the scandal surrounding the discovery of  former Rep. Mark Foley's sexually explicit IM conversations with congressional pages,is probably the one thing most people will remember from the IM industry in 2006. Security vendors have been stressing the importance of security policies for over a year now, and this scandal shed light on one of the many reasons why all workplaces need to institute a secure policy and enforce IM usage.

This year closed with amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, where, under the new federal rules, companies need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents they maintain as business records.  To this end we've seen more vendors providing integrated e-mail and IM archiving solutions, a trend we expect to see more of in the new year as businesses adapt their IM communications to meet the demands of the amended law.

Also in the spotlight throughout 2006, according to vendors such as FaceTime, Akonix, Symantec and others, was the technology advancements and growth of both spim (spam over instant messaging) and new IM worms. MessageLabs claims that total number of spims was quite low, accounting for roughly 10 percent of all IM traffic. They caution that widespread adoption and growth of IM usage itself will see those number steadily rise over the coming year.

A  study by Gartner declared 2006 as the year for IM to break into the workplace, and went on to state that over 65 percent of employees in medium to large businesses are accessing IM at work. Backing up MessageLabs' report they agree that as with any online communications medium the security threats also increase as more people use it.

Despite IM virus warnings, however, the larger problem remains what is "going out" of your workplace through IM. This year, we've seen a flood of IM security and compliance products released to help the enterprise deal with maintaining IM compliance and security in the workplace, but the trend is first on encouraging business to deploy strict IM usage policies and ensure employees stick to it as IM in the enterprise moves out of its grassroots adoption and into a more secured workplace communication medium.

Vangie Beal is a frequent contributor to Instant Messaging Planet. /BODY>