Macromedia and Jabber collaborate on collaboration

Sharing many of the same customers, two technology companies have formed a partnership to integrate their collaboration and messaging applications.

In a non-exclusive agreement, Macromedia will integrate its Breeze Meeting product, which provides real-time Web conferencing among other capabilities, with Jabber’s Extensible Communications Platform (XCP), which is a real-time presence and instant messaging application.

Initially, the companies are planning to target the federal government and financial services market.

“This is really about the fact that we have a lot of shared customers both in the government [and] on Wall Street who want to use both of our technologies at the same time,” said Joe Hildebrand, Jabber’s chief technology officer. “And if you’re going to do this, you definitely want it a little bit integrated.”

The integration will allow users to launch the Breeze Meeting application from Jabber’s instant messaging client. The user selects the people to be involved from the messenger client's contact list, clicks a "create meeting" button and all of the desired attendees get immediate invitations. “When you hit 'OK,' it pops you right in the meeting,” he said.

Users can then use the Breeze Meeting application for whiteboard, chat, voice over IP and video functionality in any browser.

“Jabber XCP is a highly intuitive presence and messaging solution that when combine with Breeze will enable warfighters to share critical information in real time to enhance situational awareness and collaboration ensuring mission success,” said Barry Leffew, Macromedia’s vice president of government sales, in a press release.

Rick Emery, Jabber’s vice president of business development, said in the government market standards groups are putting a heavy emphasis on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), which is on what the company’s real-time presence and instant messaging products are written. (Presence essentially means the device can detect whether users are online and available.)

They are looking at XMPP as a way of enabling interoperability among the various collaboration applications, he said. For example, he said Macromedia’s and Jabber’s technologies are deployed in some environments within the Defense Department.

“Well those two environments can’t interoperate,” he said. “Integrating the two is a nice story which says I want to launch this collaboration tool out of my always-on presence aware application.”

Jabber officials said they are using aspects of the XCP platform to develop and integrate a number of the applications, not just this particular one.