XMPP federation for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business 2019

Intelligent Communication is about connecting people - people that may be anywhere in the world, part of any organisation, and using any device or communications platform. Yet increasingly, the technology we deploy silos our users into closed cloud platforms.

In technical terms, we call this pattern "federation" - being able to reach users outside of our own internal realm to work together in partnership, and in turn open ourselves to be discoverable to users in external peer organisations.

This is a well-trodden path. To achieve federation we need:

1. A standardised way of communicating between disparate systems.
2. Clearly defined and auditable security and data boundaries.
3. A shared discovery, trust and authentication mechanism.

XMPP has served this purpose brilliantly. It provides a simple and elegant - yet eXtensible - protocol abstraction over the basic problem of server-server federated communication. Most importantly, it is standardised - an opportunity for true open interop across any and all collaboration platforms.

XMPP is also lightweight and implementable using standalone server components. Commonly used in defense and intelligence scenarios, forward-deployed XMPP-based systems offer collaboration functionality for isolated mission activities in constrained network and compute environments. Connectivity back to "HQ" is over XMPP federation.

At MindLink, we have a pedigree in chat system protocol-translation. To this end, we are building the MindLink XMPP Gateway for Microsoft Teams.

The gateway exposes an XMPP server-server endpoint for bi-directional federated connectivity with users in a Microsoft Teams tenant. The gateway also supports Skype for Business 2019, as a like-for-like replacement for Microsoft's 2015 server component.

Visit the MindLink XMPP Federation Gateway product page or use the link to register your interest as we move closer to launch.