IRCX
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IRCX (Internet Relay Chat eXtensions) is an extension to the IRC protocol developed by Microsoft.
IRCX defines ways to use SASL authentication to authenticate securely to the server, channel properties/metadata, multilingual support that can be queried using the enhanced "LISTX" command (to find a channel in your language), an additional user level (so there are three levels: owners, hosts, and voices), specific IRC operator levels, and full support for UTF-8 (in nicknames, channel names, and so on). IRCX is fully backwards compatible with IRC; the new features are downgraded to something a standard IRC client can see (and UTF-8 nicknames are converted to hexadecimal).
IRCX was originally supported on Microsoft Exchange 5.5 (in place of the old Microsoft Chat protocol, which is a binary protocol) and a module was available for Microsoft Exchange 2000.
Since then, Microsoft has stopped distributing software that supports IRCX, and has instead morphed its protocol into the protocol used on the MSN Chat network, which is not standardized or openly available for use (however, its usage is very similar to IRCX and therefore most IRCX clients are able to connect to MSN Chat without much modification).
Microsoft put IRCX through a standardization process, and it never became a standard for one reason or another, so every IRCX implementation bases itself on their draft papers (which are inconsistent, to say the least).
It is believed that Microsoft intended on using IRCX as the mass-messaging protocol in Exchange, before the MSN Messenger protocol was used and adopted for the same purpose.
Various unofficial implementations exist, such as Tes-X, ignitionServer, IRCXpro, MooIRCd and pyRCX.
The IRCX draft has been converted to DocBook and released under the GNU FDL and is available for reference. The source DocBook file is kept in The Ignition Project's Subversion repository in /ignitionserver/trunk/docs/ircxdraft-docbook/ircx-draft.xml.
