Cisco is now extending its revived Jabber brand with a new developer effort and tools to help embed messaging capabilities into browsers and applications.
“Cisco Jabber can now be incorporated into any web application using a browser plug-in,” Michael Smith, group director of marketing for Cisco collaboration, told InternetNews.com. “So we can now embed Instant Messaging (IM), voice and video inside of a web application.”
Smith noted that the new Jabber capabilities will help to enable collaboration enabled business processes. So when a user is in the middle of a document or some other business process, it’s just a click to collaborate with others.
Jabber can also be integrated with Google’s Gmail as a gadget to provide, IM, voice and video within a web browser. The Jabber browser plug-in integrates with Microsoft IE, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
Cisco originally acquired Jabber Inc in September of 2008. Jabber Inc. was the lead commercial sponsor of the Jabber protocol, also often referred to as XMPP which is available in open source. Smith was unable to comment about whether the new Cisco Jabber browser plug-in and associated tools leveraged open source components and whether or not Cisco was contributing any code back to an open source community.
