XMPP Basics

XMPP (formerly Jabber) is mostly used in chat (instant messaging) applications and allows near real time communication between two or more parties. It can, e.g., be used to push information from a WinCC_OA project server to one or more persons, even allowing the recipient to send a confirmation back to the server.

The server can be one of the widely available servers on the internet or it can also be a non-public server, e.g. only available in the company intranet.

Every user on the network has a unique XMPP address, called JID (for historical reasons,XMPP addresses are often called Jabber IDs). The JID is structured like an e-mail address with a username and a domain name (or IP address) for the server where that user resides, separated by an at sign (@), such as winccoa.etm@jabber.at

Since a user may wish to log in from multiple locations, they may specify a resource. A resource identifies a particular client belonging to the user (for example home, work, or mobile). This may be included in the JID by appending a slash followed by the name of the resource. For example, the full JID of a user's mobile account could be winccoa.etm@jabber.at/mobile.

Several XMPP functions are available to be used on the WinCC OA server. You can invite a user to a chat room, open a topic in a chat, kick out a user etc. You can find the list of the available functions in the table below: