Thanks to friends and God’s help, I finally managed to write the abstract, and today I received a reply that it had been accepted for the conference.
Now the main task is to unite the Jabber servers at work. There is one running central server (~300 people); I need to pull my users off it and move them to a local server. For now just for one branch (mine), with plans to extend it to all branches (14 departments, I think).
The trouble is with the roster — each user has to manually authorize contacts from the other server, otherwise those contacts show up as offline. I’m currently searching, reading, and asking around about roster sharing between servers, but so far no luck :(
The issue is quite pressing — due to crisis-driven cost cuts, Jabber is now the primary means of communication, a phone replacement. So it needs to work properly. On top of that, client bugs keep showing up (message delivery failures), leading to misunderstandings between users.
Generally, the question of alternative communication tools is pretty interesting. If users were more tech-savvy (and those who are had more free time), it would be worth trying Skype (or its alternatives), and maybe some multi-user video conferencing solutions.