[Asterisk-Dev] Presence, IM, and the All-Powerful Convergence Buzzword

[Olle E. Johansson]

John Todd wrote:
> 
> Has there been any progress in making IM integration into Asterisk?
Yes, work is going on.

We have no support for SIMPLE messaging outside of a call, only some
amount of line notification. Within a call, you can send text with
sendtext() in the dial plan to SIP phones that supports it.

Josh Colp has a patch in the tracker that adds messaging only PBX
channels and a SIP implementation of that.

Matt O'Gorman has a patch that integrates Jabber in an interesting way,
but not as a channel so you can send messages from SIP to Jabber. He
integrates with the queue system through chan_agent as far as I
understand (I've just started to look at his patch).

Both of these are proof-of-concepts that we need to use as a basis to
determine the way forward for IM and messaging in Asterisk. I would like
to see the messaging part as a text-only channel driver that can handle
text only "calls". That way, we can have chan_xmpp, chan_msn, chan_aol
and integrate SIMPLE in chan_sip. Trunking messaging over chan_iax2
between servers would be cool, if that protocol could be enhanced to
proxy presence and relay messages.

For the presence part, we need a user object. Neither of these patches
look into that. I have a few old slides that describes a possible
solution for that.

The critical part that is missing, is a design for how to take a
message-only channel to the dialplan and process it there. We need to be
able to check presence and make message routing in the dial plan, set up
text chat rooms (text-only meetme's) and look into meetme integration
with chat rooms.

I don't expect to get any bandwidth from Mark for these things pre-1.2,
but as soon as we have a 1.2, I think this is a very important part of
the next version of Asterisk and I believe that Mark agrees.

I also want to say thank you to Josh and Matt for their work in this
area! Keep on!

/O