gizmo project

[James Gray]

On Thursday 01 December 2005 02:05, David Hart wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 05:54 -0500, Chris Woods wrote:
> > Take a look at Jabber (http://jabber.org). If you're just looking for
> > internal IM and don't need collaboration with people on other IM
> > networks, Jabber might fit the bill, as you can run a Jabber server
> > internally.
>
> Jabber _does_ interoperate with other IM networks (AIM, MSN, Yahoo ...)
> if you install and configure the appropriate transports.

Plus, once the transports are configured, you can set permissions on who has 
access to external IM networks, or whether file transfers are allowed, etc.  

As a corporate IM gateway, Jabber is fantastic!  I installed it at work and 
set all the Windows users up with Psi (Jabber client) and it's been 
fantastic.  Most of our IM traffic is internal anyway, so Jabber slotted into 
our environment perfectly.  We have transports for all the major IM networks 
(ICQ/YIM/MSN) but only text-chat is allowed - not file transfers.  All the 
ports for these external IM networks are blocked unless it comes from the 
Jabber server - so there's no way around[1].

Cheers,

James
[1] - But "MSN can connect on port 80" you say?  Yeh, but our web proxies deny 
"connect" methods.  GET/POST/HEAD etc are ok though.  Some of the more 
clueful IT Operations staff and developers have done ssh port forwarding to 
bypass the Jabber server, but they (devs & itops) are the only ones able to 
use port 22 as it is, so it's not a big deal.
-- 
The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for
the reader.