On 09/24/2010 08:24 AM, Yves Dorfsman wrote:
For presence and IM, XMPP is one of the best open open protocol today. It does voice and video, but, I don't believe there are any physical dedicated devices
XMPP (Jingle) is used as a control channel, not for exchanging the media traffic. The actual voice/video capabilities depend on the client or device. e.g. Psi and Pidgin now have rudamentary p2p voice capabilities. No client compares to Skype that I'm aware of.
for it, so it'd be pc to pc only. You mention openfire, I have been very impressed with openfire, but I have only used it in small setup so I don't
I'd be wary of openfire. VC pressures have forced them to slow development of the free version.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/technology/start-ups/08sequoia.html?_r=1Beyond their friendly management GUI, I found the server lacking when I evaluated it a couple years ago. It might be good for small shops however.
know how it scales. You can also federate with other servers if that is a requirement, so you could do IM with people on gmail etc...
ejabberd, prosody, m-link are other servers worth looking into, which will probably outperform openfire in terms of scalability and customizability.
There is a huge market for SIP physical devices, and even professional servers, and professionals doing the planing and installs, and if installed properly, you should be able to interact between physical devices and PCs. Presence works, but I have never seen IM working properly with SIP (could be an implementation issue). As Doug mentioned, do talk to people who do that for a living, it will save you a lot of time and a few grey hairs. There are other proprietary, non-standard platform, such as Microsoft (don't know the name of the products), but then you run in all the usual issues such as you can only use their clients, their directories etc... and they typically do not interact with physical devices.
If you are an Apple shop, then iChat is an option. It can use XMPP for presence management and IM, and Bonjour/RendezVous/zeroconf to set up the voice/video connection. I don't know of any other clients that work with iChat.
Jesse
Depending on your budget and requirement, you should also look at the tenors such as Tanberg, with enough money, they will install a video conference room which make it hard to believe you are not looking at people accross the room.
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