"According to the Radicati Group Inc., a messaging and collaboration research firm, 45 percent of corporations are already deploying enterprise instant messaging for faster intraoffice communications. If you're looking for an open source alternative to IM products from IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, consider Jabber's Extensible Communications Platform (XCP). Setting up a Jabber IM server isn't as cumbersome as it used to be a few years ago. Here's how to do it.
"The components you need include a Jabber server (I recommend jabberd2), a Jabber client or other IM client that understands the Jabber protocol, and, potentially, LibIDN, if it's not included with your Linux distribution. LibIDN provides support for IETF Internationalized Domain Names. You also need a database (either MySQL, PostgreSQL, Berkeley DB) for storing jabberd data such as usernames and passwords..."
