Sunday, January 25, 2009

Federation frustration
I'm fit to be tied this afternoon, miffed at an inability to find some solution to federating instant messaging access between an Openfire server I'm on and the BlackBerry Messenger clients my reporters and I use.

Cursory research has led me to believe that making BlackBerries talk to other IM networks can be pulled off only by purchasing licenses for third-party apps for the BlackBerry OS like Vayusphere or Beejive and installed on the smartphones themselves.  The apps support federated IM sessions with other platforms...but not the other way around.  I was hoping for an open source plugin for Openfire that would free up access to RIM's network and negotiate conversations between the two, but no dice.  

Meebo, Pidgin, Spark (my desktop client) and other services/clients allow for proper cross-network, federated IM to most of the major instant messaging platforms - AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, SIMPLE, XMPP, and GTalk - but not BlackBerry Messenger.  

To know that cross-network communications is possible at any level is encouraging, but faced with the realization that RIM forces one-way commercialized access is a big downer.  This nut I intend to crack. 

// posted by Jason Salas @ 5:00 PM
Comments:
Jason

The native Blackberry Messenger does not use a standard IM protocol and does not offer interoperability, so your search may not lead you far.

If your correspondents would be willing to switch to say the free Google Talk service, then you can download the free GoogleTalk client on the Blackberry device, and have your XMPP server federate with Google Talk. This is a partial workaround.


Vayusphere Support
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : January 29, 2009 8:16 AM
 
Thanks! That's very helpful. My search can end. Just RIM being RIM, I guess.
# posted by Blogger Jason Salas : January 29, 2009 8:46 AM
 

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