Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking for a decent Win32 Jabber server to start testing messaging for a private messaging solution for my friends and family as well as linking to GoogleTalk and other chat services using XMPP Federation.
I tried the ejabberd and a few other Linux ports and they were extremely arcane, not user friendly, not even friendly to most good admins.
THEN, out of the blue, I ran across Wildfire Jabber Chat server. I saw the screenshots, was wowwed and immediately thought “How much does this cost?”.
Well they do have pay versions, ($19,995 for unlimited users), but they also have an opensource version as well that looks just as good, minus some of the more enterprise capabilities.
Not only is the server excellent, but they also offer a very friendly (and brandable) Jabber client software to go along with it. It seems to work ok.
Well, I went ahead and installed it on one of my secondary webservers and got it easily configured in minutes and had connected via my client. So now I started looking into the federation (interoperability) capabilities to connect to the GoogleTalk network.
I’m not quite sure which step of the configuration actually made Google work, but it does work now. As my personal beta testing progresses, I plan to turn little things back off until it breaks. But it is now working perfectly with GoogleTalk users.
The only bug I found, in my case was when I invited my gmail account, I sent the invite and then received the response back multiple times. I think it was due to my Google account being connected on multiple machines in different locations. Day job included… Will do some more testing to confirm.
If you are interested in helping me beta test, post a comment here.