My Blabber about Jabber, Unified Communication and Collaboration

By Carl Ford 

As I wait for my plane to Astricon, I am writing this article about Jabber being acquired by Cisco.  And as you would expect, I like it!

I am a bell head with a history around the Unified Messaging fiasco of the 80s and 90s.  To the point where x.400 and "Profs" were terms I used regularly, and I did not draw clouds, I drew gateways.   I say this because, when SMTP invaded my life, it was like I was the character from Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," and had been freed to see the light of day for the first time.  So still today, whenever the word "Unified" comes at me, my muscles tense and my nerves twitch.

I worked on a Presence and Instant Messaging conference where I got to see some great collaboration tools in the late 90s.  So the fact that the world is finally trying to harness the power of presence feels pretty old to me.  So for me the dominating subject of Unified Communication should be the use of presence engines and not just about people. Presence can be associated with any entity including documents, phone numbers, on duty people in roles, etc.

I think this is the real power in the Unified Communication & Collaboration story.

As I watched SIP come of age, the Jabber folks felt like the SMTP of IP communication to me.  As maniacs took the SIP protocol and started adding every Internet Drafts to SIP, Jabber was fairly focused on its purpose, which allowed them to escape the massive amounts of Internet Drafts weighing down SIP.  This is partially because Jabber has a loyal community wanting to progress their standards.  It's also because they escaped the focus of formerly proprietary communication manufacturers looking to embed themselves into SIP.  The Jabber folks got to implement SIP as an adjunct to their system and stay close to interoperability, as opposed to the folks making middleware out of SIP.

So now its part of Cisco, and I expect that a lot can be done within the Cisco ecosystem and the Jabber community. I don't expect it to be immediate, but I expect it to be simple (pardon the pun).

A few weeks ago I advised a client to use Jabber in connecting their systems with Microsoft OCS.  I said it because the interfaces are stable.   I expect that as the Cisco community comes to understand the value of Jabber, it will see the opportunity to be empowered by presence.

And with that I will be listening to the same empowerment at Astricon, where Skype is speaking at the Digium-run event. 

Presence should be the dominant conversation in UC. Not mailbox consolidation and, for me personally, not address book synchronization.   If you want to talk to me about presence, my handle is "alwaysoncarl" on all the systems, including hotmail, and, while unfortunately I am not always there, I do get the non - unified message.