Currently at Ephox we use MSN Messenger for a lot of communication but the servers are somewhat unreliable and it would be nice in some cases to be able to tie conversations into various internal systems (for instance, when talking about a bug it would be nice to “invite” the bugzilla bug into the conversation so that the conversation is logged).  There’s a bunch of other things I’d like to play with but don’t know where to start.  For the following, please ignore privacy issues, this is for company related conversations only and I’m aware of the privacy issues and will deal with them in time – I just want to play with the idea and see how far it can go first.  Something like archives could potentially be written so that only the participants of the conversation can access the archive.

It seems to me that if the server could “watch” the conversations it could trigger certain functionality off of specific keywords as well as providing a company wide searchable archive (like I said, ignore privacy for now, think of the system as a company wiki where you know everything is being logged so you only use it when you are happy with that).  How difficult would it be to modify a Jabber server so that it could do this?

Is it possible for the server to invite new people into a conversation automatically?

Is it possible for the server to pretend to be people, ie: it pretends it’s bug number 5201 and any conversation it’s in on is just logged to that bug’s record (it might even “say” things in response to specific commands/stimuli).

Anyone know if this is possible?  Anyone got tips on how to implement it?