<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head></head><body><p>Provides the interfaces and classes necessary to create customauthentication data providers for Messenger.</p><p>Authentication can be separately provided from user accounts and isonly used during initial XMPP session connection (an infrequentoperation considering the persistent nature of most XMPP connections).Implementors should concentrate on the AuthProvider interface.</p><p>Messenger also includes the concept of user groups, used to assignpermissions to sets of users rather than having to assign permissionsto many individuals which can be tedious with large user populations.The group concept is heavily used in Jive Forums upon which theMessenger user system is based. Messenger 1.1 does not actively usegroups but group support was kept in Messenger to ease futureintegration with Forums. Custom data provider implementors arediscouraged from implementing custom GroupProvider classes as the