This is one in a series of blog posts describing new features of Isode’s R14.6 release, scheduled for March 2010. You can see all posts relating to R14.6 by clicking this link.

M-Link is built around XMPP, the Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which provides a distributed Instant Messaging (IM) infrastructure.  There is sometimes a need to integrate with third party systems, including widely used centralized IM services such as MSN, ICQ, IRC, AIM, Yahoo! and SIMPLE (for Microsoft OCS).

XMPP enables this integration by support for the “Jabber Component Protocol” specified in XEP-0114.   We are adding XEP-0114 support in R14.6 (and this has been available in the R14.5 special M-Link release).  Many XMPP clients provide support for XEP-0114 and give a user experience of direct connectivity to the third party system (using XEP-0100 “Gateway Interaction”, which is provided by most XEP-0114 gateways).   This enables a deployment to use XMPP at the core, with servers under administrative control providing access to legacy and third party systems.

Isode provides XEP-0114 support, but does not provide any XEP-0114 gateways. One option is to use one of a number of open source XEP-0114 gateways such as Spectrum.

Isode recommends use of the JBuddy XMPP Gateway from Zion Software, that supports AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) and Yahoo Instant Messenger.

M-Link’s XEP-0114 support can also be used for file transfer proxies such as Proxy65 and other specialist components.