ProcessOne Blogs

OneTeam 3.0 for iPhone

2009-07-01T14:18:01Z

The new version 3.0 of OneTeam for iPhone has been released, with the push notification feature from Apple Push Notification Service (APNS).

When moving with your iPhone, as a pedestrian, bike rider, car driver or in public transportation, you might have to shutdown the OneTeam for iPhone application while staying connected to your XMPP server. It is convenient for battery saving purposes, or because you want to use another application (iPhone OS 3.0 still does not authorize background applications).

When an event occurs on your XMPP server, it is sent to the APNS (Apple Push Notification Service), which instantly relays it to your iPhone. A push notification is then poped up on your screen, with a sound played. The OneTeam badge (icon) is then changed, showing a new event has arrived, or the number of events waiting for you to read.

You simply have to tap the OneTeam icon to read your new event. The reconnection will be fast and seamless.

This feature is very handy, since you can use your iPhone the way you want (browse the web, use another application) while still being instantly notified as if you were using OneTeam on the background.

This push notification feature is also deployed on OneTeam.im XMPP server, and ejabberd has a component, IMpush, that can send push notifications to the APNS. This makes ejabberd and OneTeam the first XMPP client and server solution that supports the Apple push system.

OneTeam for iPhone has also received fixes and improvements: groupchat, file transfer, image sending... Here are a few screenshots:

An example of Groupchat:

See the Push configuration screen:

And the general OneTeam confguration:

A few comments on the experience after having used OneTeam for iPhone with push and groupchat:

"Battery life is not impacted by being always connected to my XMPP server on mobile. I have used all mobile XMPP client and this is the first time I can truely stay connected all the time. I feel this is really really the premise of the mobile revolution for mobile instant messaging and mobile XMPP."
"OneTeam for iPhone client has the type of feature you would expect from a good desktop XMPP client and not a mobile one. You can use groupchat, file transfer. This is really what I need professionally."

OneTeam for iPhone will be available on the Apple's App Store in a few days, after the usual moderation period at Apple.

IMpush is sold as soon as today on the IMstore to prepare ejabberd servers ahead of OneTeam 3.0 with push.

ProcessOne presentations at Erlang Factory

2009-06-30T13:34:22Z

There have been two presentations from ProcessOne at Erlang Factory. Here are the slides of the presentations.

The first presentation by me (Mickaël Rémond) was titled "OneTeam Media Server: Adding Video to Instant Messaging with Erlang".

OneTeam Media Server

View more documents from Mickaël Rémond.

The second presentation by Geoff Cant was title "Whitelabel Erlang" and give feedback on how Erlang can be used to write scalable hosted application for business.

Erlang White Label

View more presentations from Mickaël Rémond.

Datamonitor coverage

2009-06-23T15:44:51Z

Mickaël Rémond, CEO of ProcessOne, was covered by a Datamonitor study: "CEO Viewpoint: Social Networks Mobility = Market Opportunity".

In this Analyst Opinion series by Daniel Okubo, it is observed that social networks and mobile network operators are currently deploying IM and presence features based on XMPP.

In a competitive and recessive context, the leaders and newcomers look to differentiate in order to increase their market shares. Real time communication based on open standard like XMPP has proven a good way to value existing users base.

This document is available at Datamonitor ResearchStore, at the price of $150, or $375 for a multi-user license. ProcessOne is not affiliated with DataMonitor and does not earn any commission on sales of this document, but we thought it could be usefull to know for customers interested in ProcessOne.

Erlang XMPP library released

2009-06-03T14:30:26Z

exmpp, our Erlang XMPP library as been released.

You can find more details on ProcessOne Labs or on our exmpp Wiki page.

This is beta release and your feedback is welcome before we reach version 1.0.

ProcessOne Labs

2009-06-03T13:57:13Z

ProcessOne opens access to its labs.

Our labs are producing wonderfull pieces of code and we want to make sure that code is more largely accessible. We develop ejabberd, Tsung and various Erlang projects in general and those projects stay at the core of our business.

However, we want to make sure that the benefit of some of our pieces of code are open to anyone. We of course commercially support the project that goes out from our labs, so you can contact us if you are interested by commercial support.

ProcessOne Labs can be reach on http://www.process-one.net/en/labs/.

The first project released is a robust, fast and scalable Erlang XMPP library called exmpp.

Enjoy !

Oneteam for iPhone 2.1.0 submitted to Appstore

2009-06-02T15:11:46Z

A major release of corporate XMPP instant messaging client for iPhone has been submitted.

OneTeam for iPhone 2.1.0 will add the following features after Apple approval:

File transfer support. Client can receive and display PDF, MS Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, Images. User can take pictures and send them to contact with file transfer.
Support for HTTP links and ability to open them in OneTeam web view.
Roster caching: A OneTeam entry as been added in the preference panel to decide contact list update policy. When not updated during the session, the user pane can be use to manually force download.
Access possible to password protected chat rooms.
Ability to send crash report to the development team and report anonymous usage statistics (OS version, network connection type), to help us prepare to iPhone firmware 3.0.
Improved user interface.
Bug fixes.

Personnaly, I love the new file transfer feature and think the development team has done a great job. It is pleasure receiving a PDF file or an image and being able to review it in a usefull way. Sending images is usefull in many context as well: Sending paperboard copy, flat visit picture, etc.

Next version will likely be OneTeam 2.2.0 that will add the long awaited push features.

Here is a few screenshots:

Groupchat session in Jabber development chat room.
Note the ability to access links

File received can be opened from the chat tab and history

Dialog to send an image to your contact

Google Wave: Another step toward XMPP powering the real time web

2009-05-29T14:25:05Z

Google presented its new Wave federated collaboration platform at Google I/O conference.

As many observers (Like Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester) have pointed out, the realtime collaborative platform itself is not impressive: This is feature you can find in many competitors offer.

What is interesting however is that Google tries to leverage a development community platform by building the Wave platform on a distributed federated model, based on the open messaging standard XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). It means that you can use other XMPP / Wave enabled server to provide content for Wave platform consumers. With this move, the actual platform is really not that important. What matter is the API. The real question is whether Google will manage to attract enough developers to support this new protocol. I feel this is another step in the war with Facebook (and its Facebook API), more than an attack toward traditional collaborative platform providers like IBM and Microsoft. However, to appeal to a broader audience, Google market its initiative as "email as it should be". The way of demonstrating the platform hide the essential point: Google's aim is to build a development platform and applications are just their way to promote this initiative. Google Wave is really an initiative that complement Google App Engine and Open Social.

XMPP is already at the heart of several cloud computing platform and is becoming increasingly popular as a glueing tool for various types of services around the world. It is gaining mindshare ans supporters as a near real time protocol to power the next generation of web services and applications.

As Peter Saint Andre explained on his blog, this move demonstrates once more that

XMPP is fast. XMPP is secure. XMPP is extensible.

Will Google succeed ? The fight will be hard to gather a big enough development community. Only time will tell if they can provide the missing piece that everyone was waiting for. XMPP and the extension produced by the XMPP Standard Foundation already cover a large piece of what Google is currently promoting. However, what is sure is that this move strengthen XMPP. XMPP is set to play a major role in the Web infrastructure of tomorrow. Be sure that ProcessOne is preparing as well to be a major player in this upcoming shift of paradigm.

OneTeam Media Server presentation

2009-05-01T15:30:50Z

The slides from my presentation on OneTeam Media Server at Erlang Factory are now availble online.

OneTeam Media Server

View more presentations from Mickaël Rémond.

OneTeam Media Server source code will be available in a few days.

Your comments are welcome!

OneTeam Media Server

2009-04-30T00:35:07Z

I will present OneTeam Media Server tomorrow at Erlang Factory, in Palo Alto, California.

OneTeam Media Server, is a implementation of Flash Media Server in Erlang.

More information to come tomorrow after my talk :)

Global XMPP trends deployments

2009-04-22T10:00:28Z

We have discovered another interesting XMPP domain tracking initiative by Lars Eggert from Nokia.

Lars Eggert is running an experiment to check XMPP deployment progress among most popular web domains. The result of the experiment can be found on his Global XMPP deployments page.

It seems a less complete initiative than IMtrends as the initiative is limited to the top 500 more popular sites for a few couples of countries but it gives interesting results as well. Bottom line is that a bit more than 6% of the global top site have deployed an XMPP service of some sort.

This is a project we will watch as well on IMtrends for future updates.

Group chat on iPhone

2009-04-21T08:45:46Z

There are few XMPP mobile clients that support groupchat on mobile and there was none up to now on the iPhone. OneTeam for iPhone 2.0, just released on Apple Appstore adds on the go Multi-User Chat support.

The new version of OneTeam for iPhone adds the highly anticipated support for Multi-User Chat and several graphical and usability improvements.

It has been tested on a large number of XMPP servers and should work in most context.

If you have a feature wish list for the next release, we are listening to you !

ejabberd 2.0.5 has been released

2009-04-03T13:30:48Z

ejabberd 2.0.5 has been released.

This is a maintenance release, fixing a roster subscription bug introduced in ejabberd 2.0.4. It can be download from ejabberd official site.

ProcessOne launches IMstore

2009-03-16T13:28:56Z

We are proud to launch IMstore, a marketplace for instant messaging and real time software components for ejabberd XMPP application server.

The store sells applications that run on ejabberd XMPP application server. The first components on sale are:

OneTeam for iPhone: This is a mobile XMPP client for iPhone, on sale by ProcessOne on the Apple App Store since september 2008.
Learn more
IMgateways: Gateways are connectors for major third-party instant messaging networks (AIM, ICQ, GTalk/XMPP, MSN, Twitter, YIM). These are robust and scalable gateways, carefully maintained by our team.
Learn more

To celebrate the launch, for a limited time IMgateways packages are available at a special, reduced price !

We are planning to launch more products in the coming months. Your suggestions are of course welcome regarding your most wanted applications !

Fighting groupchat SPAM with CAPTCHA in ejabberd

2009-03-14T14:45:20Z

We have released an experimental module to protect Multi-User Chat access with character recognition challenge.

Following a recent attack on some visible public XMPP servers, we have just released a CAPTCHA support for chat rooms and documented the deployment on ProcessOne Wiki. See Fighting Multi-User Chat SPAM with CAPTCHA.

The deployment process is documented for the newly released ejabberd-2.0.4.

As usual, comments are welcome !

ejabberd 2.0.4 has been released

2009-03-13T15:49:58Z

ejabberd 2.0.4 is now ready for download.

This version is a maintenance release containing 20 bugfixes and improvements. You can read the Release notes for more details.

The new code can be downloaded from ejabberd download page.

The next release is likely to be ejabberd version 2.1 which will introduce even more pubsub, PEP and caps improvements.

As usual, we are listening to your feedback for the next releases on our ticket tracking. You can post feature requests or even vote for your favorite ticket or fix there. Thank you all for your feedback !