I am investingating working with Ignite right now.  They have a few plugins that would integrate with the Campus PBX, to allow for a real collaboration suite.  If we do it right, it would support telephony (softphone), and presence that is generated from the IM clients and non-computing devices (cell phones, and desktop phones), should the user opt-in.
 
I will let people know more as I progress further with the research. 
 
-Nick Kwiatkowski
 MSU Telecom Systems

From: MSU Network Administrators Group on behalf of Ray Hernandez
Sent: Wed 10/17/2007 2:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] IT Collaboration Tools

Since we are talking about collaboration, is there any interest in 
"corporate" instant messaging? Our department has expressed interest 
in the past in having instant messaging that would be internal to our 
group. We haven't actually made the jump yet, but I have played 
around with it.

We have toyed around with the idea of rolling out a Jabber server. 
The software we liked was Openfire(http://www.igniterealtime.org/
projects/openfire/index.jsp). It has support for LDAP and Kerberos, 
which makes it n easy fit for us since we could use our MSU kerberos 
service for authentication.

The nice thing about Openfire is that it can interface with other 
Jabber-compatible service providers so you can add people from 
outside the university to your buddy list and it takes care of the 
rest of the mojo.

I'd love to see a campus messaging service like that, but maybe 
external providers are sufficient enough for our campus.
--Ray