IRCX

IRCX is an extension to the Internet Relay Chat protocol, developed by Microsoft.
IRCX defines ways to use Simple Authentication and Security Layer authentication to authenticate securely to the server, channel properties/metadata, multilingual support that can be queried using the enhanced "LISTX" command, an additional user level, specific IRC operator levels, and full support for UTF-8. IRCX is fully backwards compatible with IRC; the new features are downgraded to something a standard IRC client can see.
IRCX was originally supported on Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 and a module was available for Microsoft Exchange 2000.
Microsoft started to put IRCX through a standardisation process with the Internet Engineering Task Force by publishing 4 Internet Drafts of their protocol.