Facebook Chat with Pidgin

In a previous post, I wrote about how you can use Pidgin to replace Office Communicator (OCS). Now, I will show you how you can use Pidgin for Facebook chat, thereby making Pidgin a truly universal chat client!

• Start the Pidgin client.
• Add a new Account with the following details:
• Protocol: XMPP
• Username: yourfacebookusername
• Domain: chat.facebook.com
• Password: facebookpassword
• On the Advanced tab, untick "Require SSL/TLS".

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).