M-Link 19.4 – M-Link 17.0 Features Not Provided

M-Link 19.4 provides significant improvements on the earlier M-Link 17.0 release.   While M-Link 19.4 provides all of the major functionality of M-Link 17.0, as well as many new capabilities and improvements, there are some 17.0 features not provided.  These are listed here.

Note that M-Link IRC Gateway is not covered here.

Features expected  in a future M-Link Release

This section sets out a number of 17.0 features that, although not of major importance,  are seen to have clear benefit and Isode expects to add them in a future release:

• XEP-0114 Jabber Component Protocol that allows use of third party components.
• XEP-0227 configuration support to facilitate server migration.
• “Send Announcement” to broadcast information to all users.
• Security Label and related configuration for individual MUC Rooms. In 19.4 this can be configured per MUC domain, so an equivalent capability can be obtained by using a MUC domain for each security setting required.
• XEP-0012 Last Activity.
• Option to limit the number of concurrent sessions for a user.
• XMPPS (port 5223) has clear security benefits.
• XEP-0346 Form Discovery and Publishing (FDP) template editor.

Customers with a clear requirement for any of these features are encouraged to contact Isode.  Isode will balance adding these features with other customer and market requirements.

Features that may be considered  for future M-Link Release

The following 17.0 capabilities are potentially desirable.

• XEP-0346 Form Discovery and Publishing (FDP)
  • WebApp viewer. We believe this would be better done in a client (e.g., Swift).
  • Gateway Java app, which converted new FDP forms to text and submitted to MUC.
• Per-Domain Search Settings, so that users can be constrained as to which domains can be searched
• Internal Access Control Lists, for example to permit M-Link Administrators to edit user rosters.

Customer feedback is sought. Isode will look to add these features if a clear customer requirement is identified.

Features in M-Link 17.0 that are End of Life

There are a number of features provided in M-Link 17.0 that Isode has no current plans to provide going forward, either because they are provided by other mechanisms or they are not seen to add value. These are listed here primarily to validate that no customers need these functions.

• Schematron blocking rules
  • These have been replaced with XSLT transform rules
• IQ delegation that enables selected stanzas sent to users to be instead processed by a component
• XEP-50 user preferences
  • This ad-hoc allowed users to set preferences overriding server defaults to indicate which types of stanzas they wanted to store in offline storage and whether to auto-accept or auto-subscribe presence.
• Management of XEP-0191 block lists by XEP-0050 ad hoc
  • Management of block lists, where desired, is expected to be performed by XEP-0191
• XEP-114 Component permissions
• Pubsub presence, apart from that provided by PEP
• XEP-78 (non-SASL authentication)
  • This is obsolete
• Some internal APIs that are not longer needed
• Support for a security label protocol (reverse engineered by Isode) used in the obsolete CDCIE product
• Security Checklist
  • M-Link Console had a security checklist which checked the configuration to see if there was anything insecure
  • This does not make sense in context of the Web interface which aims to flag security issues in appropriate part of UI
• Conversion of file based archive to Wabac
  • M-Link Console had an option to “Convert and import file-based archive…” in the “Archive” menu
  • This was needed to support archive migration from older versions of M-Link
• Pubsub-based statistics. M-Link 17.0 recorded statistics using PubSub. M-Link 19.4 does this using Prometheus, which can be integrated with Grafana dashboards.
• XMPP-based group discovery – the ability to use XMPP discovery on an object and get a list of groups back.
• XML-file archives

This was a write-only archive format used by older versions of M-Link before introduction of the current archive database. M-Link 17.0 continued to support this option.