Today we see the growing expansion of the number of media platforms. The user benefits from having access, on the same interface, to information generated by all these platforms. Examples of such communication are feeds, emails, posts on blogs, social networking activity, among others.
Among the services provided by Portugalmail – Comunicações, S. A., the company that initially proposed this project, are the e-mail and blog. The development and management of email platforms is their primary business. The question of the necessity and usefulness of email is a point of interest for this company. The contemporary user has some needs that conventional e-mail does not cover.
When thinking of the strong presence of electronic mail and the new needs of users, it makes sense to do a convergence between email and other methods of communication, including synchronous communication.
The work objective is to obtain a solution to the problem of gathering information from various sources and present it to the same user interface and allowing interaction with these sources in the same application. The solution is a client/server application and the protocol used for communication is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). The solution will enable the implementation of this product by adapting existing open-source technology.
After defining the approach, a prototype is implemented to demonstrate how the proposed solution works and serves as a proof of concept. Despite not having been proven scalability of the prototype, some decisions were made over its conception for this to be the most scalable as possible. These decisions were based on a benchmark done to the main element of the system that is the XMPP server, based on these tests was chosen ejabberd. Finally, integration with the company’s e-mail platform and contact management platform was reached.