Links

JabberView

JabberStudio

JabberTools

JabCast

Jabber Profiles

Profiles give you information on a person in your contact list.  People can choose to provide as much or little information about themselves as they wish, but some information can be very useful when chatting to someone, so users should be gently encouraged to provide what information they are comfortable making public.

The easiest way to allow the user to enter information into their profile, is from an HTML form in their default web browser.  It is pretty safe to assume that any machine running a Windows Jabber client will have a web browser.  This web page can be either loaded off their hard drive (installed with your client) or from an Internet server.  If it is on an Internet server, it means you can change the design of the form without the user having to update their client.  Either way, the form should submit the data to be stored on the the Jabber server.  Profiles can be edited in a similar manner.

Tool-tips

The simplest way to get information on someone in your contact list is to hover your mouse pointer over them.  This should pop up a small window (or at very least a tool-tip) with some basic information like the users full name, Jabber address, etc.

Other useful information that is worth including is local time (queried from the remote client, or calculated off the vCard timezone information and system clock), phone number or extension (especially useful in an office situation), job title, country, city, or gender.  It is also nice if you can include a thumbnail photo if you can extract one from the contacts vCard, as users find it easier to identify with someone if they have an image to associate to a name.

In the pop-up tool-tips there should not be any empty fields or field labels.  If some information is missing, leave it out altogether.  Since space is at a premium, I would suggest ranking the top 10 fields you would like to see, and displaying the five or so that are complete.  If you can make this user-selectable then so much the better, as everyone will have a different list of what they would like to see.

Since Jabber clients are usually run in the background, it is often the case that they do not have current focus.  Most programs will not display tool-tips unless they are they window with the current focus.  For a Jabber client it is appropriate for tool-tips to be displayed when the mouse hovers over the contact list even if it is a background window.  This saves the user from having to click on the contact list and the go back to the window they were working with if they are just quickly looking up someone's name.

Full Profiles

The easiest way to display a full Jabber Profile is to call the system default web browser with the XML from the vCard.  This solves the problem of having to create dialog boxes to display fields that will probably change over time.  Hopefully someone has come up with a (semi-)standard stylesheet for an XML vCard.

Jabber profiles are going to be reviewed to allow more flexibility and security.  Check out the Profiles Jabber Interest Group (JIG) mailing list.