XMPP

There is a great post over at Bradley Holt's blog about using Google Talk's XMPP service in conjunction with SIP from Junction Network's OnSIP Hosted PBX.

Here is my take on XMPP and SIP. XMPP is an XML-based open standard with, among other things, built-in protocols for subscribe and publish, e.g. subscribe to someone's presence information and publish your own presence. SIP, another open standard, is good for a bunch of rapid-fire, short messages back and forth. It's kind of like DNS on steroids. SIP is currently (and for the foreseeable future) the de facto standard for VOIP.

Internally we have been running an XMPP server for presence and instant messaging for a few months now at our domain: junctionnetworks.com. Additionally, using open XMPP servers like Google Talk, I can see the presence of my XMPP 'buddies' at other domains as well. If you are connected to an XMPP server, you can chat with me at mike-at-junctionnetworks.com. That address is my e-mail, SIP and XMPP address. That's what I call real unified communications. We are making these XMPP services available to all of our customers at either their current onsip.com domain or even (eventually) at their own domain. (This is something we offer today for SIP calling.)

XMPP and SIP are two great tastes that taste great together. We have written an SIP to XMPP gateway which allows us to gateway SIP information to an XMPP server. Once you have that, you can then receive instant messages and screen pops on inbound calls. Our current project is to wrap all of this up in an easy to use web-based interface for the end user. One interface will handle your presence, chats and phone calls. We'll be writing more about that in the coming weeks. The point is that we are excited to see our customers looking to use the same technology and standards that we are building toward. As always, we will keep with our corporate themes of no walled gardens, open source and open standards.