I have been contemplating rolling out a Jabber server for my employer for a while, I have always been persuaded not to do it by the lack of graphical (web or otherwise) configuration tools for the server.
Ease of user management is key since I do not want to burden my systems administrators with even more silly account management stuff which can easily be done by other people.
After a recent outage on MSN I decided to take another look and came across Jive Messenger. It is a Java 1.5 based Jabber server implementing the XMPP protocol. It has a good web based user and server management tool, I would suggest anyone looking for a corporate IM server take a look at this.
One caveat though is that its SSL implementation does not comply with the current XMPP specification so you may we have issues getting encryption going between client and server. Up side though is the developer community is quite active on their forums and have regular online conferences with users and other developers to find where they should address new features and bug fixes etc.
Hello,
You could also try ejabberd (http://ejabberd.jabber.ru). It has a web interface for administration (althought the design might not be as polished as Jive Messager) but offer much more functions, supports clustering and fault-tolerance and is amazingly stable.
The server is also very easy to use and you can try it preconfigured from a CDROM called Erlang REPOS. You can launch the software from the CDROM on different flavour of Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris, ...). If you like it, you can copy the content of the CDROM on your hard drive and still use the software as is. You can then tweak the configuration files to suit your needs.
The CDROM iso image can be downloaded from:
http://downloads.erlang-projects.org/repos/repos-1.1.iso
More information on the CDROM content on: http://www.erlang-projects.org/Public/projects/workgroups/repos/erlang_repos_1.1/view
Have fun !
--
Mickael Remond
http://www.erlang-projects.org/