The Open Source Software community(herein refered to as OSS) has been around longer than I’ve been wearing pants, and if you haven’t heard of it by now then you’re obviously some freakish anti-pant wearing lunatic, or you live under a rock. That being said, although OSS solutions don’t include free pants they do include some incredibly stable and kick ass software free of charge. So for the run of the mill corporate admin like many of you,myself included, this “free” software makes the management teams wet themselves with glee and as a result makes you look fairly intelligent. But this is not a debate about free pants, diapers and the awesomeness that OSS is, this is a quick look at various OSS instant messaging solutions that may be of value to your corporation, so lets get on with it!
There are many different OSS solutions in terms of an instant messaging protocol(see Wikipedia’s extensive list) but the most used and most widely accepted of the bunch is the Jabber or XMPP protocol. Therefore for the purposes of this article (and I know I’m going to get a nasty e-mail from Sametime fanboy) I’m only going to focus on some of the more popular/established Jabber related clients and servers out there.
As I previously mentioned there are two basic parts to any IM solution, a server instance and a client of some kind. With the Jabber protocol these pieces of software are all easily interchangeable so we’ve got some flexibility there. Anyhow, this article is going to run through the server side of things, after which I’ll go through some clients, ramble on about something else, and finish it up with a nice dry summary!
[h2]Servers[/h2]
The easiest way to go over servers is to outline the basic functionality you want out of a server and go from there. To keep things simple I’m going to give a brief outline of each server in point-form style and have a little narrative after each. Should anyone have any suggestions as to basic functionality that I’ve missed please email me.
[h2]Servers – Wildfire[/h2]
[h]Important Misk:[/h]
[b]Platform:[/b]*Nix/Windows
[b]Features:[/b] Everything and the kitchen sink
[b]Size:[/b] 5mb Tar File
[b]Ease of Installation:[/b] Easy
[b]URL:[/b] http://www.jivesoftware.org/wildfire/
[b]Download:[/b] http://www.jivesoftware.org/downloads.jsp#messenger
[h]Platform:[/h]
Wildfire supports a smattering of different OS’s including Windows, and pretty much any *Nix based OS you can find that has an updated (greater than 1.5) JVM installed. The server we used for the basis of this article was an IBM Server Class quad P3 xeon with 4GB of ram and a default(all packages) installation of Slack 10.0. The OS choice is really up to you as the install process for Wildfire is dead simple for whatever you choose.
[h]Features:[/h]
As outlined above, Wildfire has just about every feature one could dream up for an IM server. If Wildfire doesn’t have a feature that you’re looking for right out of the Tar, you can usually find what you’re looking for in the extensive list of community written plugins.
The buzzword in most corporate IT environments these days seems to be LDAP. If you’re not familiar with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol(AD to you Microsoft heathens) then it is likely that you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, as this rock is obviously very comfortable I suggest you stay there. 
For the rest of you famliar with daylight you can breathe easy as Wildfire fully supports integration with most LDAP environments!
Another handy feature that drew me to Wildfire was the ability to have server managed contact lists. This means that you can setup default groups of contacts and serve them out to your user base, handy for things like departmental listings and/or company wide IM listings. As trivial a feature as it may be I was surprised to find that Wildfire is only one of a few that offer this ability.
[b]Ease of Installation[/b]
Installation is dead simple. If you’re able to decompress a file in a *Nix environment then you’ve already got the skills require to install Wildfire. The hardest part of the entire process is picking where you want to put it. After decompressing the archive you ./ the wildfire executable, fire up a web browser and point it at http://yourserver:9090.
From the handy dandy web based admin console you perform all setup/installation tasks that are necesarry. Wildfire offers you a choice between running a static backend or a dynamic backend, for smaller and less intensive messaging environments a static backend should do just fine, but if you’re planning on having hundreds of users I would go with some sort of a dynamic backend.
I chose to go with a dynamic mySQL driven backend which meant I had to create a database and assign a user to said database. After that it was a simple matter of entering that information when prompted during the install process and away I went.
[h]Summary:[/h]
Jive Software really has a well written piece of software on their hands. The installation process is a breeze, the features they’ve included out of the box are wonderful, and from my experience so far the software is nothing but stable. I think the other open source server offerings are going to have a hard time topping Wildfire.
[h2]Servers – eJabberD[/h2]
[h]Important Misk:[/h]
[b]Platform:[/b]*Nix/Windows
[b]Features:[/b] Just about everything and the kitchen sink
[b]Size:[/b] 10.5mb bin
[b]Ease of Installation:[/b] Moderately-Difficult
[b]URL:[/b] http://ejabberd.jabber.ru/download
[b]Download:[/b] http://process-one.net/en/projects/ejabberd/download.html#binaries
[h]Platform:[/h]
eJabberD supports a smattering of different OS’s including Windows, and pretty much any *Nix based OS you can find much like Wildfire. The server we used for the basis of this article was an IBM Server Class quad P3 xeon with 4GB of ram and a default(all packages) installation of Slack 10.0.
[h]Features:[/h]
[b]Ease of Installation[/b]
[h]Summary:[/h]
