XMPP Federation

What the? I hear you ask. No it's not some new techno-bable...well ok perhaps it is, but it's very very cool. Geek cool that is.

XMPP is a protocol for doing instant messaging. Ok that's cool. But it's also based on XML. Yep that's cool too. Better still, it is the protocol used by Google Talk which if I can be honest, is also cool.

I decided some time ago to run my own XMPP chat server. Mainly to keep company communications within the company and to allow tie in of cool things like monitoring alerts into the system.

I have that working fine but something that my system couldn't do was communicate with the outside world.

Until now.

I have managed (though I don't know exactly how) to get XMPP federation working which is the method where different XMPP servers can talk to each other.

This means my internal account can now talk to my google account and vice versa. This means I can take advantage of the fact that Google has enabled chatting from within the gmail webpage. Thus whilst checking my gmail I can also chat with work colleages which is a funky thing.

Well, ok it's also another instance of work tying me down and stuff but it's still handly to be able to communicate like that. IF I'm off at a client site perhaps and can't (for some reason) log into my internal chat service, I can just chat to work people via Google Talk.

Pretty cool if you ask me. But you probably won't, so that's ok.