Spectrum - XMPP IM Gateway

article published on: Fri 19 Mar 2010

A perfect way to use ICQ, MSN and others via Jabber/XMPP.

First of all: If you don't have any idea what Jabber/XMPP is you might want to take a look at Wikipedia. There es a really good explanation.

If you want to concentrate your complete instant messaging, XMPP transports/IM gateways are a real good instrument to do so. Using one service for different IM accounts has got a lot of benifits, if one is using multiple devices (desktop PC, laptop, smartphone, ...). If you are using a free available XMPP-server it might or might not support IM transports. If you are running a XMPP server by yourself you have choice whether you want to support IM transports or not. To configure such an IM gateway can be done in at least two different ways:

1. using a compatible plugin for your XMPP-server
2. using an external component that can be used with all XMPP-servers that support external component

I prefer the second one, as it is more flexible and not fixed to a special server-software. Spectrum is such an external component and runs as a seperate process. It supports a wide range of protocols:

• ICQ
• MSN
• Yahoo!
• AIM
• FaceBook
• Gadu-Gadu
• IRC
• and others

To get a full feature overview you can go the "supported protocols"-page of Spectrum. It uses libpurple to talk to other services than XMPP, so the chance to get a good supported protocol bandwidth is very high. Spectrum is easy to configure and the setup doesn't need any real explanation. The config file is well documented and unambiguous. If you want to setup an XMPP-service with the ability to talk to users from other IM networks, you definitely should take a look at Spectrum.