Instant messaging provides the instantaneous communication of a telephone call, while avoiding the feelings of directness and confrontation of a face-to-face meeting with the detachment of written correspondence, making instant messaging a popular and flexible form of communication. It allows two or more users to exchange text information in real time.
The Jabber protocol is particularly popular in the corporate environment. It's hosted on distributed servers which provides uninterruptible service, and it's an open source protocol, so it can be adapted to work with many other protocols.
Jabber is a extensible Chat protocol and it has accumulated various features over time such as Voice over IP and file transfer signaling. Unlike most instant messaging protocols, it is an open standard, which makes it more reliable. Like email, Jabber is an open system, meaning anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run their own Jabber server and talk to users on other servers. The standard server implementations and many Jabber clients are also freeware or open source software.