John Developer

Netbeans 6.5 ships with Developer Collaboration as default. It may not be obvious from the description or from the dialogs, but it seems the feature works with any normal Jabber account. So there's no need to create yet another account on share.java.net, but you can use an existing account on a public or in-house Jabber server. We have tried it with two accounts on jabber.ccc.de and were able to use the Collaboration successfully.

There is a major drawback, though: Collaboration doesn’t implement the concept of Jabber Resources. You can’t set the resource to use in Netbeans or it’s priority. That means that messages that others send to you end up in Netbeans as new collaboration session. In the contact list you can’t select the resource of other people, either. Essentially that means that you can’t use your normal chat account for Collaboration.