Collaborative Thinking

What does Facebook's support for XMPP mean to the enterprise?

If you are a enterprise organization rolling out instant messaging and presence platforms from IBM or Microsoft, then the roadmap that Facebook revealed does not alter what is going on behind the firewall all the much. Organizations involved with unified communications based on SIP/SIMPLE are not going to significantly change their minds or direction because of Facebook per se.

But, a couple of points are worth mentioning. First, this announcement adds further credibility to XMPP as a worthwhile standard that IT architects and infrastructure planners should be aware of - and actively monitor. Second, XMPP should become a core requirement for organizations implementing gateways that federate their internal instant messaging and presence systems with public networks and other platforms (such as Facebook). Third - not only is Facebook supporting XMPP but Twitter is also aligned with XMPP. There have also been on-and-off discussions on possible synergies between XMPP and Atom/AtomPub. Perhaps at no other time has XMPP looked so interesting to so many different audiences.

For IBM, I would expect someone from IBM's unified communication and collaboration team to realize that this is a great marketing opportunity. At some point, I expect IBM to aggressively pursue interoperability between Facebook's XMPP system and the Lotus Sametime Gateway. 

For Microsoft, this news presents them with a problem - they are in a position that is almost impossible to defend. There is absolutely no technical reason why the current Microsoft gateway does not support XMPP today. It is simply a political decision (in my opinion), by the folks at Microsoft as they compete with Google. Granted, GTalk does not have the market share of other public networks (Yahoo!, AOL), but even so, the strategy is clearly not customer-focused at all.

While promoting anything that helps Google might be difficult to accept, Facebook's implementation of XMPP might prompt Microsoft to reconsider. Facebook has a credible install base and its position as a leading social network site, (coupled with Microsoft's partnership with Facebook on other fronts), might likely persuade the company to finally support XMPP within its IM/presence gateway. Such a move I believe would be well-received by many of Microsoft's customers.

Using Facebook Chat via Jabber

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to:

• Communicate with their friends
• See which of their friends are online and view their profile pictures
• Set their statuses

Users can securely authenticate and authorize applications to connect to Chat on their behalf and send messages to their friends just like they can on Facebook.

Facebook Developers | Facebook Developers News

Understanding Twitter & Social Dynamics

Stephan Baker's blog post plus link to the BW Online story below:

Here it is. Got held up a bit because BW Online wanted to run an edited version. This is what I sent Tuesday night. Please suggest fixes and adds.

It’s easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the micro-blogging rage. “my nose is leaking,” writes someone called Zapples. “so imma go to sleep now…” But I’ve heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some myself) on the phone—an important technology if there ever was one. The key question today isn’t what’s dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with chicklet-sized messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary.

Here's why I'm looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers. Businesses such as H&R Block and Zappos are now using Twitter to respond to customer queries. Market researchers look to it to scope out minute-by-minute trends. Media groups are focusing on Twitterers as first-to-the-scene reporters. (They were on top of the May 12 China earthquake within minutes.) Loads of new applications and services are growing around the Twitter platform, leading some to suggest that the micro-blogging service could become a powerhouse in social media.

Blogspotting The Twitter Story I've been working on - BusinessWeek

The Geo-tagged Life

Interesting and innovative. Would be nice to see this implemented for participants within a VoIP call, web conferencing, etc. as well as video broadcast:

Seero - Putting Video on the Map

Seero.com is a geo-broadcasting platform for users to broadcast and experience destinations around the world. Seero fuses live and on-demand video with GPS mapping to create a rich and unique user experience. Our goal is to shake the foundations of how you see video with a platform that promotes exploration and geographical awareness.

Seero's Features

Broadcast live video and archive it for on-demand playback.

Track GPS position in real-time and archive a course for playback with video.

Explore the world and discover video through an innovative geo-navigational interface.

Geo-tag your video clips to showcase the destinations where they take place.

Experience location specific factoids and feeds with a video broadcast.

Seero - Putting Video on the Map

DimDim: Conceptually Perfect, But Reality Is...

The challenge for DimDim is that people are moving away from stovepipe decisions for on-premises web conference tools in large organizations. Within the large enterprise and many medium size companies, decision criteria are slowly shifting towards a UC framework. That dynamic, coupled with that fact that many currently installed on-premises web conferencing systems are driven by an application need (e.g., virtual classrooom), means that DimDim needs to think ahead of the curve and not target current scenarios. What I would suggest would be to integrate DimDim with open source VoIP (i.e., Asterisk), embedding an IM/presence gateway to federate with systems (e.g., IBM, Microsoft, public networks) and integrate with a select area of vertical applications to help champions shape their business case. Strategists might be interested in a more cohesive open source platform framework that plays to a UC context than simply replacing one functional tool (web conferencing) with another. 

What about our Webex/GoToMeeting bills? No, way we need that for sales. What if we switch to DimDim, a freemium, open source-based alternative? And right there we have a nice, simple, "no duh" value proposition and one that will be popular in a recession. But, does the software work?

I got a demo last week, and the answer is sort of, mostly. What was really sweet was that there was no download required; one click from the email link and I was connected to the presenter's desktop, could see his face on a video screen, and we could voice and text chat. The "sort of" is for the few minor glitches we experienced (which Steve, the CMO, fixed on the spot) and I think it crashed Safari on me, but then lots of things seem to crash Safari these days. So DimDim is perhaps not quite ready for prime time, but it seemed very close.

DimDim’s No Duh, Recession-Proof Proposition - ReadWriteWeb

OCS Webcasts for April 2008

Eileen's page has the links and speaker information:

OCS Webcasts for April 2008

• TechNet Webcast: Compliance and Archiving in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200)
  Friday, April 04, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Disaster Recovery in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200)
  Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: All About Communications Server 2007 Security (Level 300)
  Wednesday, April 16, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: All About DMZ and Edge Servers in Communications Server 2007 (Level 300)
  Monday, April 21, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Firewall Transversal in Communications Server 2007 (Level 300)
  Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
• MSDN Labcast: VoIP, the "Out-of-the-Box" Experience with Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 (Level 200)
  Thursday, April 03, 2008 - 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Pacific Time

Eileen Brown's WebLog : OCS Webcasts for April 2008

Microsoft UC (OCS) Presentations and Demos

Via a post from Eileen Brown who cites a valuable collection of UC resources (including a plug for Interact08). Just follow the link below to Brett's blog to download several decks on Microsoft's UC solution (decks are on PPT 2003 as well as PPTX format).

Now the dust has settled after the global UC launch the event presentations and demo's can be located Here

As well as all the case studies there are following decks:

• Administering within a UC environment
• Deploying Office Communicator 2007
• Embedding UC in your applications
• Exchange Server 2007 SP1 overview
• Security and governance in UC solutions
• Solutions for mobility and anywhere access
• Unified communications and the end user
• User-focused approach to optimal VoIP quality
• VoIP Topologies and interoperability
• Web conferencing solutions

Brettjo :: Microsoft Exchange Messaging : UC (OCS) Presentations and Demos

Connectivity Scorecard

Innovation work commissioned by Nokia Siemens Networks. The press release provides some background context (deficiencies in the use of communications technologies). You can download the PDF version of the reports by visiting the site (just click on the citation link below):

New measures provide more comprehensive results on ICT usage

Unlike other research available, the Connectivity Scorecard measures usage and skills such as literacy, the use of enterprise software and the accessibility of women to ICT. It also articulates the benefits of connectivity explicitly in terms of economic and social contributions taking into account varying needs in different countries.

Different economies have different needs

Economic growth of innovation driven economies depends on new ways of using connectivity, whereas for efficiency and resource driven economies social development plays an important role in getting the most from connectivity investments.

The study shows that even the world’s best connected countries such as the Unites States and Sweden are not exploiting communications technologies to their fullest potential. Given the room for improvement on multiple measures of connectivity, there is every reason to believe that the worldwide gain from improving connectivity could be significantly higher.

Connectivity Scorecard

Jabber XCP Delivers Eventing via Pubsub

What will likely become a very critical component of "lifestreaming" that augments Atom/AtomPub (also a fundamental component):

Our developers are at it again, adding support to Jabber XCP for XEP-0163: Personal Eventing via Pubsub, which should be of interest to anyone following the evolution and use of presence technology. XEP-0163 lets users send updates about anything to users on their rosters. Personal eventing lets people easily publish things about themselves - it doesn’t get any more user-centric than this! The updates are sent using the XMPP Publish-Subscribe functionality used in Jabber XCP’s InfoBroker and described in XEP-0060. One way to look at it is that XEP-0163 takes XEP-0060 functionality to a more personal level.

...

The success of Twitter (which has XMPP in its architecture, BTW) and other similar services proves that personal eventing (in addition to presence, in general) is valued in social network settings. Service providers should be interested in the increased stickiness that personal eventing brings to their communities. Once users get used to seeing their friends’ moods, blog posts, activities, etc. they are more likely to stay in the communities which publish these details. The extension of social network technology to enterprise applications is in full swing, so by adding support for Personal Eventing via Pubsub to Jabber XCP, our extensible and highly scalable real-time presence and messaging platform will take the Power of Presence to a more personal and valuable level. The customers we’ve talked to about PEP have some great use cases and they will use this new functionality in their deployments. How about you?

Jabber Filaments Blog » Blog Archive » Jabber XCP Presence Platform Gets Personal (Eventing via Pubsub)

Peter Saint-Andre on Presence

Worth listening - I have enormous respect for Peter and the work that the XMPP community has accomplished. We tend to put XMPP in a box (yet another protocol for instant messaging that also happens to handle presence). That's unfortunate. XMPP has a diverse range of possible applications - for instance, there's a lot of talk lately about the synergy between XMPP and lifestream tools (e.g., Twitter) as well as a means to augment Atom/Atom Pub systems. I have no qualm with SIP at all but remain convinced that SIMPLE is fundamentally flawed, is being used by vendor to advance their own agendas, and should not the one-basket-for-all-eggs direction pursued by the industry when it comes to approaching "presence" in a broader sense. SIMPLE will have it's role, but XMPP should not defacto be dismissed as an option.

Peter Saint-Andre is Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation. XMPP (formerly known as Jabber) is today's leading instant messaging protocol. As Skype users know well, IM is nothing without simple presence signaling. Lee and Peter talked about emerging presence.

Lee Dryburgh, host of the March Emerging Communications conference (co-sponsored by Skype Journal), interviewed Peter Saint-Andre (mp3, 48 MB, 50:00).

Skype Journal: eComm2008 blog: Peter Saint-Andre on Presence

Meanwhile, Over At WebEx: A New Sheriff In Town

Cisco has gone a little quiet regarding WebEx Connection, collaboration beyond unified communications and building out the partner ecosystem (channel and technology vendors) that will drive success for its composite application platform. The story below provides some insight:

Making sure that Cisco’s sales teams are motivated to sell WebEx services has just become the responsibility of a new general manager at the on-demand Web meeting provider. The sudden departure late last year of Cisco’s former chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo, who had been widely regarded as heir-apparent to succeed John Chambers, led to a rapid reshuffle of top management at Cisco. That meant promotion for Don Proctor, who’d been general manager at WebEx for just three months, and who now reports directly to Chambers on all of Cisco’s software products. Four weeks ago Doug Dennerline (pictured) took over as senior VP of the collaboration software group and thus the new general manager of WebEx.

.....

Dennerline outlined four main priorities that he sees for WebEx this year.

• Get Cisco’s sales team selling the WebEx service
• Finish preparations for a production launch of WebEx Connect, the company’s on-demand collaboration and composite applications platform
• Harness Cisco’s partner channel to sell WebEx
• Tap Cisco’s resources to bolster research and development of new WebEx services

» Taking the reins and tending the cows at WebEx | Software as Services | ZDNet.com