On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 3:00 AM, Jesse Thompson < jesse.thomp...@doit.wisc.edu> wrote:
> I'm looking for guidance. > > Aren't we all? > Now that Google is transitioning to Hangouts, they're no longer supporting > XMPP federation. > > Well. In principle. But it seems there's *some* federation, but it's incomplete. > If we enable Talk/Hangouts for our domains, then in the future, if Google > has a change of heart regarding their commitment to open federation > standards, and they enable XMPP federation for Hangouts, then it will cause > a huge problem for us because there will be two federated XMPP services > hosting the same set of users. > > Yes, you'd need to host them on different domains (a huge hassle), or migrate one to the other (equally huge hassle). > So, should we assume that Google will or will not enable XMPP federation > for Google Hangouts ever in the future? > > I don't think either assumption is safe. > If we assume that they've permanently abandoned XMPP federation, then we > should enable Google Talk/Hangouts. Correct? > > Well. Maybe. > If we assume that they *might* someday enable XMPP federation, then we > should *never* enable Google Talk/Hangouts for our domains in Google Apps. > Correct? > This seems safe. The situation is roughly that Google have dropped federation of at least some services running over XMPP. For some reason, they'd rather not explain what. I think it takes the excitement out of trying to run interoperable services, or something. And besides which, we're all spammers, right? Some bizarre examples are that I can see my phone and tablet (both running Hangouts on a Google Apps domain) online, as a resource beginning Messaging, but messages sent there are dropped. On the other hand, the Mail widget (resource beginning gmail) does receive messages (whether bare or full jid), and can even reply. This is, of course, silly and broken. But what alarms me is that this probably has implications for your XMPP deployment choices - if you enable Talk and Hangouts for your Google Apps domain, you're likely to end up partially federating, and I'm willing to bet that some activity which currently goes to your XMPP service will end up trapped by your Hangouts service. It's not clear what the scope of the misdirected activity would be, but it may well be enough to confuse remote contacts horribly (especially if they're unaware of whether they're using a Google Apps domain or not). The net result is that I'm thinking the only safe option currently - and this may change - is to avoid enabling Hangouts if you want to continue hosting your own XMPP service. Dave.
