Instant messaging vendor Jabber has released the next version of its IM appliance with a focus on interoperating with corporate directories and consumer services.

JabberNow 1.1 is designed to help customers integrate their deployments of IM with consumer services from Google and AOL. The appliance includes an add-on for integrating JabberNow with user information stored in Active Directory. Jabber also has added more sophisticated archiving features to help users meet compliance requirements.

"Interoperability capabilities are becoming much more critical [for IM]," says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "If you look at the way IM is used now, it is useful for intracompany business, but increasingly it is going to become key for talking to people outside the company."

Osterman says AOL has done a good job federating its IM service. He says users with AOL Messenger can now talk to about 75% of IM users in the workplace. AOL has struck deals with Jabber, Microsoft and others using its AOL Federation Gateway.

Gateways now support interoperability between such services as Yahoo, AOL and MSN and corporate systems, such as Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Live Communications Server, Antepo, Jabber and WiredRed.

The hope is for such standards as Session Initiation Protocol and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to provide that interoperability. A recent study by Osterman Research showed that half of corporate IM users would prefer a standard to support interoperability, but they are willing to accept the gateway, or federation, approach as an interim step.

Jabber is adding GoogleTalk directly into JabberNow, which first shipped last September and features a quick setup model. Jabber and Google support the XMPP, and Google users with open source XMPP clients also can access Jabber IM features such as multiuser chat.

Interoperability with AOL is done through a software add-on to the JabberNow appliance that supports server-to-server communication. Users don't get the depth of functionality Jabber offers on its platform, such as text conferencing, but connections with AOL users support presence information, IM and indicators when someone is typing. The names of Jabber users show up with a special icon in AOL buddy lists and vice versa, and Jabber users do not have to have AOL accounts to appear on AOL buddy lists.