3
Pidgin integration
Question asked by Erik White - 5/11/2017 at 1:09 PM
Answered
We would like to enable XMPP chat that is not limited to the domain itself. Pidgin seems to be a good alternative posed by the smartertools website as a third party XMPP platform, however, the next step then becomes how to implement this to clients. Do we:
 
1. install pidgin on the windows 2012 server itself, and then allow users to login?
2. direct users to install pidgin on their devices individually
 
as i am typing this i am thinking that the first option may not be possible due to synchronization conflicts alone, but then again smartermail is able to handle that with it's own chat, so I'd like some confirmation from a techy or someone who knows better. Thanks

6 Replies

Reply to Thread
1
Employee Replied
Employee Post Marked As Answer
Hi Erik,
 
Many members of our team use Pidgin as their preferred XMPP client. As far as I am aware, this must be installed directly on the users' devices. I've never heard anything about installing Pidgin on the server itself and syncing it down to the users.
 
That said, please be aware that even through Pidgin, the chats sent through the SmarterMail domain can only be sent to other users and aliases on that domain. However, your users will have the option to add multiple accounts in Pidgin, so they could use their SmarterMail account to send chats to other domain users and use an alternative account to send to external domains. For example, on my personal laptop I use Pidgin, and I have my SmarterTools.com domain configured so I can chat with my coworkers. I also have my Gmail account configured so I can chat with my Gmail contacts.
 
Pidgin supports a ton of protocols, so you may be able to find a common one to use for chatting users who are not on your SmarterMail domain. For example, if you want to chat with other domain users who are on your same network, Bonjour might be a good option. It's a serverless messaging protocol developed by Apple Inc. based on XMPP that operates only on a local network. I've never actually used that on Windows, but from my brief review, it seems like it could work. Check out this Pidgin documentation for more info on what they support: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Protocol%20Specific%20Questions
 
I hope this helps!
0
Erik White Replied
Thank you, this boiled down to a misunderstanding of how IM chat/various protocols work, you cleared that up.
 
Any chance I can get an engineer to tell exactly what line of code tells the contact list to compile a complete list of domain users? Its really bad that we cant simply turn off the fact that every user on a domain shows up by default. My rough estimation on how to proceed would be to remove that 'populate list' command, then populate the list strictly based on the contacts added in that user's contact list (I believe I saw a web services api call for that)
0
Michael Replied
I have 2 follow ups because we were looking for a good recommended Windows XMPP client and I see above Pidgin is used in-house at Smarter Tools. That's good.
 
1. If we're all on the same Smarter Mail server can users on Domain 1 message users on Domain 2?
2. When user on Domain 1 logs in using Pidgin do they see all other users on Domain 1 so they're able to message them? Or do they need to add the user somehow?
0
Employee Replied
Employee Post
Hi Mike. Currently chat (XMPP) is limited to users within the same domain.
0
Michael Replied
@rod When user on Domain 1 logs in using Pidgin do they automatically see all other users on Domain 1 so they're able to message them in an automatically generated list? Or do they need to add the user list manually somehow?
0
Matt Petty Replied
Employee Post
They should be able to see everyone else along with any aliases, if enabled on the alias. They will see these immediately after logging in, depending on your client it may hide users who are not logged in, this would be a client setting.
Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Reply to Thread