The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Multi-party Chat Using the Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP)' (draft-ietf-simple-chat-18.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Robert Sparks and Gonzalo Camarillo. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-simple-chat/ Technical Summary The Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP) defines a mechanism for sending instant messages within a peer-to-peer session, negotiated using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Session Description Protocol (SDP). This document defines the necessary tools for establishing multi-party chat sessions, or chat rooms, using MSRP. Working Group Summary There has been controversy about doing this work in SIMPLE. The XCON working group was chartered to do create similar mechanisms in a media independent fashion. There was a compromise consensus to do this draft in SIMPLE with the idea that, with its smaller scope, it could complete more quickly than the XCON work, and that it would be a short-term solution until XCON completed the more general work. This in fact did not occur, as this draft took longer than expected due to several editor changes. Discussion at the SIMPLE meeting at IETF75 concluded that we should capture the parts of this draft were specific about mixing MSRP at a conference bridge, but abandon the rest in favor of XCON. However, this conclusion did not achieve consensus when brought it to the working group list at large. We readdressed this on the SIMPLE list in September 2010. A few participants strongly argued that the work should be abandoned, as it conflicted with (now substantially complete) work in XCON. But others (including at least one implementor) argued for completion. In particular, several people argued that this draft enabled them to build a light weight text-chat service without requiring all the features enabled by XCON. Note that the XCON working group has since completed its work and closed. In summary, the working group originally had a consensus to complete this work, and has not achieved a consensus to change that plan. We had agreement to pubreq version 07 in late 2010. The shepherd found some issues during the PROTO review. The work group discussed the substantive changes since version 07 on list, and we had a similar consensus to pubreq version 11 without a new WGLC The apps area review turned up some issues with the internationalization of nicknames. The related updates, as well as a new normative dependency on the PRECIS work, have been vetted on the SIMPLE list. Document Quality. The document has quite a bit of review over its lifespan in the SIMPLE work group. It lists Eva Leppanen, Adamu Haruna, Adam Roach, Matt Lepinski, Mary Barnes, Ben Campbell, Paul Kyzivat, Adrianv Georgescu, and Nancy Greene as reviewers in the acknowledgments. The document has undergone an MMUSIC expert review (Flemming Andreasen), since it contains an SDP extension. It has been through WGLC, multiple consensus calls, as well as an IETF last call. It has had 2 Gen-ART reviews (Christer Holmberg as Suresh Krishnan) , as well as IANA, apps-dir (Alexey Melnikov), tsv-dir (Cullen Jennings), and sec-dir (Vincent Roca) reviews. The shepherd believes that all issues raised in these reviews have been resolved. There are at least two existing implementations, "Blink" as a client and "SylkServer" as a server. A few others have indicated the intent to implement it. Additionally, the GSMA RCS 5.1 specification references this document in order to use the a=chatroom attribute. Personnel The document shepherd for this document is Ben Campbell. The responsible Area Director is Robert Sparks.
