This tutorial consists of two parts - 1) Business Impact (Presence-Powered Application) and 2) Overview and Technical Effort

 

Each is critical to implementation of any new concept, solution or feature.  The world is full of too many technologies "in search of" a user.  In other words, users are too busy to learn something they don't need.  With so many "mashed up" systems and software, technical effort can be complex, take a long time and too risky in terms of security or "cross contamination" with other software and systems.  Last, businesses will not spend money anymore on solutions without an immediate and significant financial benefit.
 
Key Point - Overview
            OCS XMPP gateway now provides "anymail" (gmail, Google Talk, Yahoo, etc.) and SIP-Session Initiation Protocol supported IETF-Internet Engineering Task Force approved standards such as Jabber for presence and two-party IM-instant messaging chat via XMPP-Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol.
           
Technical Effort
XMPP-eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol operates in a server-client model (not peer-to-peer) and gives each network end-point a unique address called a JID-Jabber IDentifier. JID are used both externally and internally to express ownership or routing information and formed of a domain, node, and resource in the following format: [node@]domain[/resource]
The JID elements are defined as follows:
- The Domain Identifier is the primary identifier. It represents the Jabber server to which the entity connects. Every usable Jabber domain should resolve to a Fully Qualified Domain Name.
- The Node Identifier the secondary identifier. It represents the "user". All Nodes live within a specific Domain. However, the Node Identifier optional, and a specific Domain (e.g., conference.jabber.org) is a valid Jabber ID.
- Resource Identifier is an optional third identifier.
 
XMPP, Jabber and Presence are all critical elements in today's technical messaging strategy.  Just released, Microsoft has enabled more integration of different email and IM systems.

 

According to Microsoft, "the Office Communications Server PIC-Public IM Connectivity license provides instant messaging and presencefederation to the Windows Live, AOL and Yahoo! public IM networks.  The LCS-PIC-Live Communications Sever Public IM Connectivity license will be renamed OCS-PIC-Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity license.  Starting October 1, 2009, the following licensing changes will be made:

A PIC License will no longer be required for federation with AOL-American Online.  Customers qualify for federation with AOL if they have Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL-Customer Access License or active Software Assurance on their current LCS/OCS license. 

 

Customers who want Yahoo federation will continue to purchase PIC licenses.  The price of PIC will be reduced by 50%, effective October 1, 2009, to reflect this change. 

The Microsoft OCS-Office Communications Server Gateway provides Presence and two-party IM-Instant Messaging interoperability with the XMPP based systems of Jabber and Google Talk.

 

The Gateway interoperability has been tested against Jabber CXP Server version 5.4 and the current version of Google Talk.  The OCS 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway is supported by Microsoft Support

 

This Gateway is licensed as Additional Software to OCS 2007 R2, meaning that there is no additional license cost associated with deploying the Gateway for OCS 2007 R2 licenses."

The complete Microsoft write up can be found here: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/10/02/620.aspx
 
IM "Parts" Rich Presence
Categories, Containers and Watchers
Categories
     - Decompose the presence document into smaller pieces ("categories)
     - Identifies type of data being published
     - Collection of data elements {Category name, value} - based on pre-agreed XML schema

Containers - Membership Lists
     - Combination of publications and watchers- different watchers get different categories such as personal, team, workplace, public
     - Membership definition (ACLs-Access Control Lists)
     - Watchers assigned to one or more containers
Allow multiple instances of categories to be published for different containers

Watchers
     - Watchers receive notification of any category instance published to their container
 
Apply ACL-Access Control Lists in many ways:
- URI List (per user)
- Same Enterprise
- Domain List
- Federated Users
- Public Cloud Users
- Clients free to connect without server handshaking
 
A Jabber server plays three primary roles:
1- Handling client connections and communicating directly with Jabber clients.
2- Communicating with other Jabber servers.
3- Coordinating the various server components associated with the server.