Skype is proprietary and have innovated a lot, I believe nobody else pools bandwidth the way they do.
Is this for a company? How big? My experience is: For presence and IM, XMPP is one of the best open open protocol today. It does voice and video, but, I don't believe there are any physical dedicated devices for it, so it'd be pc to pc only. You mention openfire, I have been very impressed with openfire, but I have only used it in small setup so I don't know how it scales. You can also federate with other servers if that is a requirement, so you could do IM with people on gmail etc... There is a huge market for SIP physical devices, and even professional servers, and professionals doing the planing and installs, and if installed properly, you should be able to interact between physical devices and PCs. Presence works, but I have never seen IM working properly with SIP (could be an implementation issue). As Doug mentioned, do talk to people who do that for a living, it will save you a lot of time and a few grey hairs. There are other proprietary, non-standard platform, such as Microsoft (don't know the name of the products), but then you run in all the usual issues such as you can only use their clients, their directories etc... and they typically do not interact with physical devices. Depending on your budget and requirement, you should also look at the tenors such as Tanberg, with enough money, they will install a video conference room which make it hard to believe you are not looking at people accross the room. -- Yves. http://www.SollerS.ca/ http://images.SollerS.ca/ xmpp:y...@zioup.com _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/