Jabber and MSN

[MTecknology]

First post. Everything else has previously been covered in the forums and found pretty easily.

Jabber works flawlessly from within my own server. Unfortunately, I can't chat with anybody outside of the server.

I'm hoping to move my instant messaging to Zimbra only because I have been extremely impressed.

Is there any way I can send messages to Yahoo, MSN, other Jabber, etc.? If not, is it a planned feature? If not, can it be?

I realize this is still beta but I consider it stable enough to trust.

On the other side of things. Thanks for making a product that is so great, I can't imagine going back to trying to configure postfix, courier, apache, roundcube, logging, blah, blah, and blah all by myself and by hand.

[MTecknology]

I've been doing some looking into this. From what I can see, it is possible to have Zimbra Jabber communicate to outside messenger servers.

It looks like I need to add a txt record to DNS but I can't find what format.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
-Mike

[webman]

Hi Mike

From the ZCS 5 release notes (p7):

Note: Update about Instant Messaging feature - In order to ensure the scalability of our server software and provide a quality experience to our customers, we have removed IM interoperability with AOL and MSN that was present in previous 5.0.0 beta releases. This functionality may be restored in a future release.

[MTecknology]

What about others such as Yahoo and another Zimbra servers Jabber?

Thanks for the quick response today.

[webman]

Sorry to be the barer of bad news

I can't speak for Zimbra, but I would imagine 3rd party service interoperability will come later at some point. The IM functionality is still in beta and could do with some more features (eg. currently no CLI/GUI to manage friends lists - kind of important for large deployments) - which need to be fully tested first.

Perhaps one of the employees can shed some light on the service interop progress?

[MTecknology]

Sorry to be the barer of bad news

I can't speak for Zimbra, but I would imagine 3rd party service interoperability will come later at some point. The IM functionality is still in beta and could do with some more features (eg. currently no CLI/GUI to manage friends lists - kind of important for large deployments) - which need to be fully tested first.

Perhaps one of the employees can shed some light on the service interop progress?

It's that that bad of news as far as I'm concerned. I'm still in enough awe at Zimbra as a whole. I imagine that's what it means when you guys say Beta.

Thanks very much for letting me know what's going on,
-Mike

[webman]

Yeah, Zimbra is pretty darn good. The 4.x to 5.x version jump saw a lot of 'behind the scenes' changes, mainly from Tomcat to Jetty. Maybe it was too much in one go to include a working IM interop at the same time as a lot of other changes? I'm just guessing now... I think they did the right thing in playing it safe for the time being though.