In a teleconference last Friday, Joe Hildebrand, Jabber Inc.'s CTO, outlined a number of sophisticated features included in the 2.7 release of Jabber's instant messaging product line, Jabber Messenger. In particular, Jabber has releasing persistant chat rooms as an adjunct to their existing real time communication platform.

Persistant chat rooms are well-known in the consumer instant messaging arena, and have been a fixture in the financial services industry for some time. Such chat rooms are a multi-user instant messaging session that does not terminate like typical transient instant messaging sessions. The intent is that these chat rooms become "places" that users return to over time, related to some specific topic. In the financial services industry, messaging services may support chat rooms that persist for years, for example, a F/X (foriegn exchange) chat room that F/X traders log into every day.

Chat rooms line up with all sorts of projects within the enterprise. A proposal team, the corporate budget committee, or a group brought together for a marketing campaign -- each of these groups could easily be associated with a persistent chat room so that the various members of the teams can remain in contact over the course of the project.

Note that the presence status of the members is displayed within the chat room, and that starting up a side conversation with a chat room member is only a click away.

Jabber's implementation provides certain notification features that pushes the offering into the knowledge management market, to some extent. A Jabber user can create "filters" associated with one or more chat rooms based on certain phrases or keywords. In this way, a user can be notified whenever 'Turkish Lira" appears in any of the selected chat rooms.

Jabber Inc. worked with the Open Jabber Foundation to develop a formal specification of the chat room protocol as an enhancement to the Jabber protocol standard (JEP 0045).

My Take

I have long maintained that persistent chat is the most obvious point of intersection between instant messaging as a real-time collaboration medium and the more traditional 'slow-time' collaboration approaches. Real-time interaction of project teams is better handled within persistent chat rooms than dozens of ad hoc IM sessions. The history of interaction provides context, and when integrated with more conventional collaboration technology (such as documents, discussions, project plans, and so on) real-time collaboration becomes the driver for the 'slow-time' forms of collaboration. Jabber's 2.7 release is a good indicator of where persisten chat will be taking us, as this integration becomes a commonplace in the next few years.