Private IM system – piece of cake

I was talking to my buddy Troy the other day and he told me about a private IM system that they use at the bank.  Using IM for quick, nondescript communications takes a huge load off of the email system by keeping this sort of very common exchange out of email where it has to be backed up, stored and archived. I asked what they used to do this.  Troy said they used Pidgin as the client but he did not know what was used on the back end.  A little bit of searching on Google and I found some answers.

Evidently there is an open IM protocol called XMPP that is used by various providers, including Google talk.  I found a free XMPP server package called Openfire that took me less than 10 minutes to get running.  I threw it on a spare workstation for now for testing.  It has very little overhead.  The Pidgin client was equally easy to get up and running.  In the span of about a half hour my personal IM network was created.

I think it could really have some nice advantages in our network.  Of course there is always the possibility of abuse by people that fall into the IM black hole which can consume productivity quickly so it’s something that may have to be only deployed to certain people. At a minimum our IT department can use it quite often.

Tomorrow at this time I should have just completed running a 5K in Lebanon.  Perhaps I’ll be chewing on a piece of ring bologna to celebrate.