Working Groups: Sample Charter

WG Name: Integrated Infrastructure for Instant Messaging (I2IM)
Topic Area: Middleware
Chair: Michael Gettes, Duke University (gettes@duke.edu)
Internet2 Liaison: Ken Klingenstein
Flywheel: Steve Olshansky
Mailing list:
General Discussion: i2im@internet2.edu To subscribe to the I2IM list, send email to listproc@internet2.edu, with the message body: subscribe <list name> <your name>
List archives are available <http://archives.internet2.edu/> (user registration required).
Web page: http://middleware.internet2.edu/i2im/

Background

Instant messaging (IM) services have traditionally not been integrated into a campus enterprise IT infrastructure. Services like IRC and AOL Instant Messenger have been widely used by university people for university-related work, raising issues of authentication, authorization, privacy, and legal compliance. As IM becomes an increasingly popular alternative to email, users look to campus IT services for the same level of support and integration traditionally provided for central email services. Popular IM services have used proprietary protocols, and standards efforts have not been entirely successful at this point.

Given all this, many campuses have made initial efforts toward designing campus-scope IM services around Jabber/XMPP technology, which has benefited from an open process, open-source implementations, and, recently, IETF-led protocol standardization.

Charter/Objectives

The I2IM WG intends to address the following sets of issues:
  1. The WG will research the issues surrounding enterprise integration of IM services with respect to authentication and authorization, focusing on Jabber/XMPP technology. Where possible, it will document how to perform this integration and provide forums where people can learn and help each other in addressing these integration issues within campus contexts. Where appropriate, this WG will work with the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) to consider appropriate modifications or other techniques for achieving better enterprise integration.
  2. The WG will investigate current and future designs of Jabber/XMPP regarding authorization services, and how authorization information is transmitted and interpreted, especially between domains. It will consider how to integrate these methods into emerging campus and inter-campus authorization systems.
  3. Based on interest and technical feasibility, the WG will consider this range of issues for other non-proprietary IM technologies.
  4. The WG will consider and possibly instantiate a national or international federated IM service. It will look at feasibility and applicability of leveraging technical methods like SAML/Shibboleth, and the policy frameworks coming from federations such as InCommon.

Links - Technical

IETF Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (xmpp) WG http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/xmpp-charter.html
Jabber Software Foundation http://www.jabber.org/
Shibboleth http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/



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