Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Pidgin SIPE Plugin for OCS

We recently switched from Reuters Messaging to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 (OCS) at work and I was disappointed to find that OCS:
  • does not have tabbed conversation windows, which leads to a cluttered desktop and cramped taskbar.
  • does not keep conversation history logs. I believe this feature only works if you use Outlook and we use Lotus Notes.
In order to get around these issues, I am now using Pidgin with a plugin to connect to OCS and don't need the OCS client anymore!

Install SIPE Plugin for Pidgin:
This is how you can install the plugin to use Pidgin for OCS:

  • Download and install Pidgin from here.
  • Download SIPE from here.
  • Unzip pidgin-sipe-1.8.0-msi.zip and run pidgin-sipe-1.8.0.msi to install it.
  • Start the Pidgin client.
  • Add a new Account with the following details:
    • Protocol: Office Communicator
    • Username: firstname.lastname@company.com
    • Login user: firstname.lastname@company.com
    • Password: xpPassword
    • On the Advanced tab, tick "Use Kerberos" and untick "Use Single Sign-On".
That's all you need to do to connect to OCS from Pidgin. You can now enjoyed tabbed conversations and view logs stored in %APPDATA%\.purple\logs\sipe.

You can also add the following useful plugins to Pidgin:

  • Text replacement
  • Guifications
  • Pidgin GTK+ Theme Control - you can download themes and install using Theme Selector (which should be present in your Start Menu).
Posted by Fahd Shariff at 2:40 PM
Labels: ,

15 comments:

  1. pier113:49 PM

    Hi Fahd,
    It's my pleasure you are using our product in your organization (Deu...)
    Advice to you:
    - It's safer to not provide your login/password but enable "Use Single Sign-On" instead. (put fake pass, like "1" it complains).
    - You may continue use your reuters account with SIPE, eventhough the official client of version 6 has been banned from the network.
    - You may want to disable Exchange integration in Advanced tab of account settings, a new 1.8 feature, as you don't have it anyway.

    Question - where did you get "Text replacement" plugin? We are annoyed with disclaimers.

    And finally, I think about killer feature for SIPE - calendar integration with Lotus Notes/Domino. So other users will see your availability precisly, like if you'd use Outlook.
    Check our Feature Request section on the site for this feature development.

    Also interested in your feedback on SIPE - what features are you missing, what issues experiencing. Please tell us on SIPE site.

    Regards,
    pier11 /SIPE author/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fahd Shariff1:43 PM

    Thanks for your comments. I think the Lotus notes integration will be great!

    The Text Replacement plugin is part of Pidgin and can be enabled through the Tools > Plugins menu.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1:41 PM

    Hi Fahd,

    I'm trying to use SIPE with Pidgin to connect to OCS. As I'm using portable version of Pidgin, I downloaded the "pidgin-sipe-1.10.0-win32-bin.zip" file and extracted all the files to Pidgin folder. But somehow I'm not able to see "Office Communicator" protocol.

    Do you have any idea what could be the reason?

    Thanks & Regards,
    - Vivek

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous2:04 AM

    I have same problem as Vivek, please advise.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unknown4:23 PM

    same here

    ReplyDelete
  6. Unknown4:25 PM

    btw, I am using Windows 7 32 bit

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous11:31 AM

    Hi

    First if you have installed Pidgin in a different directly than Program Files/pidgin, you will have to move the extracted files from pidgin-sipe-1.10.0-win32-bin.zip to your pidgin directly installation....

    Also you shoud copy iconv.dll and libxml2.dll in pidgin root directory

    Only after you will see the communicator plugin available in the list of protocols.

    It works for me and I am available to chat with other communicator people.... However in outlook when I was using the real communicator tool ,some green/orange/yellow bullets were present to inform you the contact is online or not
    but with pidgin this has dissapeared

    Regards
    Marco

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous2:45 PM

    I tried pidgin-sipe-1.10.0-msi with pidgin 2.7.5, even put it in the directory where the pidgen executable is stored. But after installing it I still dont see the protocol avilable. am i missing something?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous12:41 PM

    same problem

    ReplyDelete
  10. Chaz5:47 PM

    Marco - That fixed it for me. Thank you!

    -libxml2.dll and iconv.dll in PortableApps\PidginPortable\App\Pidgin
    -Extract files from pidgin-sipe-1.10.0-win32-bin.zip to PortableApps\PidginPortable\App\Pidgin

    ReplyDelete
  11. Sebastian Muñiz2:50 PM

    For those that even after installing LCS/OCS plugin are still not seeing Office Communicator as a protocol option:
    Get libxml2.dll and iconv.dll from
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/files/sipe/pidgin-sipe-1.10.0/
    and place at pidgin root directory.
    Restart pidgin.
    Thanks a ton.

    PS: those files are not present in more recent plugin zip files. Not sure why.

    Sebastian

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous9:14 AM

    I had the same problem. What I did was this:
    I downloaded the "Pidgin 2.7.10" portable
    I downloaded the plugin:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/files/sipe/pidgin-sipe-1.10.0/pidgin-sipe-1.10.0-win32-bin.zip/download
    After extract the zip, I copied the contents into the pidgin directory.
    I modified the name of the library "libxml2-2.dll" to "libxml2.dll" and it worked.

    rgargar78

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous12:33 PM

    I am not able to connect.I get the message 'Authentication Failed' ..
    any suggestions ?

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous2:30 AM

    This blog had been very helpful for setting up Pidgin to talk to Office communicator.
    Thanks so much.
    I wish SIPE plugin installer takes care of copying iconv.dll and libxml2.dll in to proper directory hence forth.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Anonymous7:00 PM

    I was struggling with this for some time now. The directions from Sebastian are very clear and got me up and running in a minute.
    Thanks All

    ReplyDelete

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