Jabber and SRST???

Question

Cisco, 
I'd like to see if proper SRST support for Jabber is coming to CUCM and IM&P, or if the community is going to continue to be limited in this area? In its current iteration, Jabber is only SRST capable if an active connection to IM&P remains in place. In most cases, this is a catch 22, as increasingly remote environments and users, if losing connectivity to CUCM, lose connectivity to the colocated IM&P server as well. That limitation makes absolutely no sense at all. 
Many customers these days are looking to cut costs, and with the advances in application capabilities and feature sets, many are going softphone only and doing away with desk phones altogether. I have one such customer in the early stages of their BE deployment right now. They wish to use Jabber only, but require SRST at their 10 remote site locations. Because of the, frankly, ridiculous caveat in Jabber, this is proving to be a serious issue for the deal. 
Our only option for softphone failover is IP Communicator. Why would an aging platform that is no longer the standard or direction that Cisco is pushing be the only option for softphone failover? If Jabber is the new standard, its feature set should at least be comparable to what was, and provide for phone mode only SRST capability. At this point, I now have to configure and maintain inert CIPC devices in CUCM for use on the off chance a remote site circuit goes down. Add to that the overhead for management, user turnover, and additional training on a platform that users will infrequently use, and it adds up to a lot of lost dollars in time.  
This has been an issue since Jabber's release, and a hot topic on the forums since the early versions, and still goes unresolved. I believe that this is a very worthy feature for Cisco to address (and more useful and silly things like popup chat windows and toasts) and I'm disappointed that the community's pleas have gone unanswered. 
Can we please please get this on the roadmap?! Thanks!
Jimmy

Answer 1

I haven't gotten any info pointing toward a full resolution on the roadmap. What I have learned from a Cisco contact is that Jabber will continue to function if its running when the connection to IMP and CUCM are lost, however, if Jabber is closed, any subsequent login attempt after that, while CUCM and IMP are down, will fail. Of course, this isn't a very viable solution for a customer. Here's what we're doing for failover with Jabber only environments. 
We're are installing redundant WAN circuits at each customer location that Jabber can then use for MRA registration back to CUCM and IMP at the two locations where the severs reside. That gives complete redundancy across the sites from the two HQ server locations all the way out to the branch office. 
Thanks
Jimmy