What uses have you found for XMPP that help you as a web developer/manager?

Question

To make my question clear:

I'm experimenting with XMPP, lately - I have set up my own XMPP server and trying to figure out what uses could it have in our development process. Except the obvious things (we use it for IM-ing and have set up a group chat room for our team), we employ it as a notification platform for our issue tracking system and our continuous integration system.

I have already thought about some other possible uses such as monitoring the state of our servers (via the presence layer), application exception notification (via PubSub), etc.

My general idea is to build some kind of unified support system for our development process that will communicate through a regular IM client (PubSub support would be great, though) and will make our processes much more transparent and more responsive.

Have you ever thought about something like this? Or do you use something completely different for this purpose? Am I just reinventing the wheel?

Answer 1

Web site notifications (most likely through changes published to Atom feeds) that get pushed out to subscribing IM clients via pure PubSub or PEP (PubSub subset) are going to be a big application, outside of vanilla enterprise instant messaging.

Answer 2

I wrote a bot that knows how to talk to our ticketing system (our Trac site). Users can ask to see the tickets for the current sprint, tickets assigned to them, they can "grep" through tickets, get the current Milestone information and update ticket fields (workleft, status, owner or attach comments). That's been pretty popular with several developers -- and getting people to keep their tickets updated is a Good Thing.

Answer 3

IMified (imified.com) is a pretty nice way to build out the kind of applications you are talking about.