MESSAGING PIPELINE: Setting a Course Toward Instant Messaging Federation

Antepo CEO Maxime Seguineau explores the business drivers and best practices for securely extending instant messaging networks.

From the article:

"A clear priority will be given by businesses to the creation of ecosystems that will allow secure, cohesive and scalable real-time collaboration between the enterprise, its customers and its suppliers, as well as with other players within the same industry vertical.

Federation is a term used in the IM industry to describe the ability for IM servers to communicate in a distributed network using trusted relationships, and without requiring users to establish separate credentials on each system to which they wish to communicate. Federation delivers the ability for users on one system at one company, for example, to exchange IM with contacts on another system installed in a separate enterprise – without requiring each user to establish a password and maintain an account on each other’s system.

Federation, or server-to-server connectivity, is widely considered a pre-requisite for the significant adoption of interoperable IM systems. Federation is what users expect based on similar experience with e-mail – no knowledge of the foreign systems is required, just a valid address of the recipient.

For the complete article, visit Messaging Pipeline.