My organization is considering using Jabber as an agnostic device to device to application messaging protocol.
Does anyone know of the best practice existing Microsoft competitor to Jabber? Or, an emerging competitor? And, if so, a good URL reference to get a jump start?
Website for Jabber: http://www.jabber.org/web/Main_Page
Jabber is several things : the older name of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), the jabber server and application, and the jabber network.
Windows Communication Foundation is a web-service based API for communicating between applications?
Office Communicator is an application that uses SIP/SIMPLE messaging protocol.
What do you really need? The application or the protocol/api with which to build an application?
The company I work for just abandoned Jabber in favor of Microsoft Office Communicator, which will integrate against AD, and indicate when users are unavailable because of meetings/appointments in Exchange.
I really like Jabber, for jumpstart, I would recommend you to see this list of Jabber Server software which you can use to run your own server I personally use ejabberd on Windows 2003 Server, also look at this list of Jabber Client Libraries for many languages, I'm happy with Jabber.NET library...
I could see why you'd want to replace a cross-platform, standardized protocol supported by everyone with a proprietary single-vendor single-platform alternative that no one else uses. Or maybe not.
Check out Coversant's XMPP server/client: Coversant SoapBox Studio They also have an SDK that will allow you to customize their server and build your own clients.
Another alternative is AGS-XMPP link text They have a set of libraries that will allow you to create your own XMPP (Jabber) server (non-trivial) and client.