Jabber is an Instant Messaging and Presence technology which allows for real-time collaboration. It offers some unique advantages over traditional approaches involving e-mail and mailing lists. The ECE department maintains a Jabber implementation, which is available to all ECE account holders. Using your ECE account credentials, you can sign onto the service. Registration of 'new' accounts via the Jabber service is disabled and expressly forbidden.

The department's Jabber service requires TLS/SSL endpoint encryption for all connecting clients. This ensures the securing of both login/password exchanges upon signon and any inbound or outbound instant messages during transit.

The department's Jabber service supports Multi-User Chat (MUC). This allows for users to create customized chat rooms, and invite other members signed onto the service to join the chat.

Currently the Jabber implementation offers both offline message storing along with server-side contact/buddy lists. ECE-IT is working on removing this functionality in order to allow the implementation to be used as a true 'real-time' service. The storing of messages and transcripts presents a liability to the department in the instance of any legal requests from the Office of Legal Affairs, such as subpoenas.