Any plans to add gateways to AOL, Yahoo, or MSN. I am evaluating your product against Tipic, and I like the Jive product better, but the one big plus with Tipic is its gateways to AOL, Yahoo and MSN. Wondering when you guys will have that feature?
Hi,
We’‘d like to add gateways to the server but it hasn’‘t been a highly requested feature, represents a fair amount of work, and it doesn’‘t scale well. In general, the server gatewaying to one of the other IM networks right now must act as a client for each of the gateway’'d users. This requires a separate connection for each and quickly consumes a lot of resources. This is especially a problem with our server since we must dedicate a thread to each connection (most Java Virtual Machines and operating systems have thread limits in the hudreds or thousands).
In addition, most IM systems like AIM ‘‘blacklist’’ machines that have more than some number of connections to their server. This results in XMPP servers that gateway getting shut out of the other systems when gatewaying for any large number of users. Watching a server with a large user base gateway to another IM system is like watching a pitched battle. The gateway goes up, then is blocked. The admin codes a work around, is back up for a week, then goes back down again.
I strongly suggest that you test any server gateway solution with a sizeable simulated user population and over at least a few weeks. I don’'t know any XMPP solutions (or any solutions period) that can gateway from the server reliably to another IM system for a large number of users.
The only scalable multi-IM network solution I know of is to do the gateway on the client (the client logs into each network separately). This is the tactic taken successfully by Gaim and Trillian clients for example. If you need logging, then you must log at the client, or have the client relay all the communication on other networks to the XMPP server for logging using a custom XMPP protocol.
Hope this explains the current situation both for Messenger and for multi-IM systems in general. Feel free to ask more questions. I’'m sure a lot of other people are interested in this topic.
-iain
Thanks for the response…I believe I will create a multinetwork client instead…of relying on gateways for the reasons you mentioned. Thanks a million…you have saved me a lot of time.