Real Time Collaboration got a bit more interesting on the Jabber/XMPP front yesterday with two announcements. What's interesting is that they hit both sides of the RTC space - the corporate and the consumer.

The first is the soft-roll of Google's jabber service, talk.google.com, complete with handy client for Windows users.

The second is the announcement of Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g. Pitched in the media as a Sharepoint competitor, it also bundles in XMPP/Jabber for RTC 'significantly enhanced for secure, archivable, enterprise use'.

We now have another pair of fronts in the flanking attack on the old proprietary (AIM, Yahoo, etc) networks for RTC, which is a good thing. It continues the move Microsoft's made - in their Live Communication Server - to SIP/SIMPLE, which enables federated authentication to those older networks, as well as opened up new options for various partners to prepare products to extend this service to those necessary elements like groups, archival searching, and the like (full disclosure - my former employer offers such a product).

All this change is good but it does leave some decision points which are distinctly hazy. I suspect that the SIP/SIMPLE camp will have - at least for now - a leg up in the enterprise space. Oracle's product isn't due until March 2006, but MSFT LCS is more current, if more troublesome for entrenched enterprises to deploy. MSN is still a very popular client in the world, and LCS offers a federated mechanism to handle namespaces for customers not on an enterprise's direct network.

But if one was touching the consumer space, or in the social software space, the lure of a flood of users coming in through the marketing muscle of Google with an open standard client would be very strong - especially since the open toolkits exist and have been tested over several years by many eyes. Though any of these entities could just as easily spin their own Jabber server, the presence of a well funded entity lends more credence, perhaps.

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Posted by esinclai at August 24, 2005 06:50 AM |