Jive Talking Alternatives to Microsoft LCS

Published: October 31, 2006

by Alex Woodie

If your organization is thinking about a next-generation communication system, it's hard not to hear Microsoft and its message about unified communications. The company's flagship Live Communication Server offering is almost preordained to capture a large chunk of the emerging market for Voice Over IP (VoIP) and "presence aware" communications. But there are alternatives to MS LCS out there, and one of them is Jive Software, a company with a hybrid open-source development model and a Jabber-based product with an intriguing roadmap.

Jive Software is probably best known for its software used for hosting forums and "wikis" on the Web. Jive Forums and KnowledgeBase, as the products are known, have been around for more than five years and are used by some of the biggest names in IT, including Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Oracle, according to Matt Tucker, the chief technology officer of the Portland, Oregon-based company.

While most of Jive's revenues are a result of Jive Forums and KnowledgeBase, most of the potential growth lies with the company's instant messaging (IM) product, called Wildfire, which was first introduced with an open-source license 21/2 years ago, and is currently being downloaded from the Jive Web site 10,000 times per month, Tucker says.

Jive is taking a hybrid approach to developing and licensing Wildfire. The open-source version of Wildfire (free at www.jivesoftware.org) is distributed under the General Public License (GPL) and installs on any Java-enabled server. The software, which is based on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) standard (also known as Jabber), enables users to communicate with other XMPP users, including its own open-source Spark client.

Organizations that require more functionality than the GPL version of Wildfire can buy a license to Wildfire Enterprise, which is delivered as a plug-in to the free Wildfire server. Wildfire Enterprise delivers features such as archiving (important for regulatory compliance), keyword searches, real-time reporting, and client control features (for simplifying deployments and upgrades), and an AJAX-based customer chat product called "FastPath" that users can integrate into their own Web sites. Wildfire Enterprise licenses start at $1,995 per server and $10 per user, or $19,950 for an unlimited number of users.

Later this month, Jive plans to announce the general availability of Wildfire version 3.1, which will bring some important enhancements in the area of interoperability with other IM networks. While Jabber is an accepted standard (it was ratified by the ITF in late 2004), most public IM networks--such as the AIMs, MSNs, and Yahoo!s of the world--still rely on their own proprietary IM protocols, which makes interoperability a problem.

Jive will address this gap with the delivery of public gateways in Wildfire 3.1 that will allow all Wildfire users to instant message with users of AIM, MSN, Yahoo! users.

Tucker hopes other IM vendors will eventually get smart to IM standards (XMPP in particular), but he doesn't appear to be holding his breath. He compares the current state of IM to the early days of e-mail, before the adoption open e-mail standards.

"There were a lot of siloed islands. There was CompuServe and AOL, and if one of your friends had another, you couldn't send e-mail to each other," Tucker says. "What happened with e-mail is SMTP, POP3, IMAP emerged, and suddenly users could send messages back and forth. That same thing is happening with IM.

"So you need a two prong-strategy. You push forward on open standards and hope that everybody uses that standard. But the flip side is you need to be practical, too. You need a way to talk to them, too, so we're launching gateways," he says.

While XMPP is not yet close to being accepted as the IM standard, there are promising signs. For example, Google announced earlier this year that it would adopt XMPP with its Google Talk IM network. However, Google Talk is not in the top three IM offerings. "Over next year or two, the big public networks hopefully will open up their networks. But it's not a guarantee that they will use XMPP," Tucker says.

Standards are also being hashed out for the next generation of unified communications products, including VoIP Internet phones. While Microsoft pushes the adoption of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to provide the "presence-awareness" for integrated VoIP communication, Jive would really like to see an alterative protocol--an XMPP extension called Jingle--win in the public arena.

Tucker has a couple of thoughts on Microsoft's adoption of SIP in LCS that could help customers navigate this complicated and evolving field. In the first place, he says SIP isn't really "the best fit" for VoIP, and second, Microsoft is not using SIP, but a set of proprietary SIP extensions that they have built (probably because SIP isn't to the best fit for telephones in the first place). "They'll say they're open, but the reality is they've extended it a lot," he says. "They're really the only vendor going that way [toward SIP]. The rest of the industry seems to be headed toward XMPP."

Jive plans to hedge its bets and support both SIP and XMPP-Jingle with Wildfire version 3.2, which is not due for a while. The plan calls for Jingle to be supported in the open-source version and for SIP to be sold via the Wildfire Enterprise plug-in.

Just the same, Jive would rather see the XMPP stack emerge as the standard. "There's never been an open standard for real time collaboration, and for the first time ever, one is emerging," Tucker says. "In the next six months to a year, it will play out. There's a ton of work to make [SIP and XMPP] work together, [but] there are lots of drivers to make it happen." The government, for example, is interested in moving the standards process along, he adds.

In fact, Jive is currently working on an IM implementation with a government customer. The Kentucky Department of Homeland Security found it couldn't make Microsoft Live Communications Server work for its needs--implementing IM communication in all of its emergency vehicles--so it selected Wildfire.

The organization picked Jive due, in large part, to the flexibility of the open source model. Because a bright white screen would ruin state DOH officers' night vision, the department required a way to dim the IM screens. Jive helped them build a plug-in that allowed officers to switch to a screen with muted colors with push of a button. "It wasn't totally complicated," Tucker says. "But we had source code available and that that's why people are often attracted to open source software."

In this case, the hybrid open source model provided a clear benefit to the Kentucky Department of Homeland Security. The trick for Jive is repeating this success. "It's important to have good relationship between the open source and Enterprise versions. You need to have customers installing the open source product, using it for free and getting value out of it, and then move them to Enterprise," Tucker says. "The open source model is always challenging. There's not a playbook" on how to proceed.