fanf | Signing up for more work

Foolish, I know, but I'll get stale if I do nothing but email. This week I are been mostly writing a draft proposal to be given to my senior management team, suggesting that I should implement a Jabber service for Cambridge University. All comments and suggestions welcome!

http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~fanf2/hermes/doc/jabber/proposal.txt

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

bens_dad

I'm assuming that you are in close and regular contact with wiki-type people (IIRC the CS have an internal wiki, and CARET's "CourseWork" has a discussion board as well a wiki) ?
I mention this because (as a deskbound luddite welded to email) it isn't
clear to me where people draw the line between immediacy and permanence. (At some level I'm see a wiki as the archive of a chat room).

"Presence" is clearly a desirable feature.

Does jabber handle "not present" well - can I tell it that I'm not jabbering at the moment and that the sender's client should email or text me instead ?

From:

bens_dad

> the sender's client should email or text me instead
Mentioning text (SMS) makes me realise that people may ask that jabber messages appear on their mobiles: I doubt that all students have 3G or IP phones, so that means SMS. If that can be done without a per message charge I'd like to know how; if not we need to be ready to tell people
we aren't doing it ?

From:

fanf

wikis

I have some idea of what's going on in that space, and I think the richer our set of communications mechanisms the better. Of course the downside is that this makes choice of venue harder - but only if you insist on fixing the venue up front. A better model is to start off with whatever seems most convenient and move as the participants and content change. For example, a sketchy blog post may turn into an email discussion that refines the ideas, which get posted on a wiki page as a more formal record, which is collaboratively edited by people who are using IM to co-ordinate.

not present

I need to examine this in more detail. Jabber servers usually archive messages that are sent to you when you are offline, and deliver them when you return. There is an extension which allows you to publish "reachability" over other media (phone, etc.). However I can't find any specifications for redirecting messages when offline. It would be relatively simple for a server to do so unilaterally, but it would be better if there was a way for a Jabber client to configure its behaviour.

SMS

It's probably not feasible for us to deliver Jabber messages over SMS, because of the cost - I don't think free SMS gateways would let us abuse them this way. It might be possible to use the University pager system, but that's a bit of a minority audience. However, there's still the lack of appropriate specifications.

multi-media

Jabber is essentially a text-based system, though it is not limited to that. There is a set of extensions which allow clients to exchange byte streams with each other, either in-band within the Jabber protocol, or out-of-band using SOCKS5 (TCP and UDP). At the moment the only defined use for this is file transfer, but it's likely that Google Talk uses something based on Jabber's session initiation extension for its IP telephony facility.

The relationship between IM and telephony is currently up in the air, because Jabber is esteblished in the former space and is moving into the latter, whereas SIP is established in the latter space and is moving into the former. It'll be interesting to see what happens.