443

Back to the ‘not really’ beginning of the Internet (mid 90s), it took many years before enterprises put up a corporate mail server and offer an account to each employee. At that time, it was felt like excessively dangerous to open the corporate information system to a wild and unknown Internet. Besides, it was also felt like a time-consuming gadget, not suited for the enterprise.

Today, IM is felt the same: dangerous and time-consuming. It is not felt like it should: accelerated, federated, standard communication system with the whole world. It will take nearly the same amount of time and effort before IM gets corporate, before employees get a corporate Jabber ID. Companies having a corporate, federated Jabber server nowadays are just the exception, early adopters.

Nowadays, IM in the enterprise – when they are aware or consider it exists – is blocked as much as possible: mainly ports and domains are blocked. More precisely, through the corporate proxies/firewalls, some domains are blocked, and only two ports are open: 80 for HTTP (the web), and 443 for HTTPS (the encrypted web).

So, the only solution to have a working IM client inside the enterprise (that can communicate with the entire world, just like e-mail), is to subscribe to an external, open, federated server from inside the company… and hope the domain/port is not blocked.

If the domain of your Jabber server is not blocked, it is unlikely that ports 5222 and 5223 are open.

So, fellow federated Jabber server admins, please open and make your Jabber server listen to port 443, so that Jabber can be accessed by the more people in the enterprise, so that Jabber becomes more corporate than it is today (Jabber is perceived like home, geek stuff), and so that Jabber become more and more successfull… while waiting for HTTP Binding.