If you are like me and your business uses Microsoft Office Communicator (OCS) for their chat and collaboration tool but you prefer to run Linux instead of Windows, you've been out of luck trying to connect to OCS from Linux. Well, not anymore. There is a new (still development) pidgin SIPE plugin available that will allow you to connect to and use OCS from pidgin under Ubuntu/Mint.
I did not put these instructions together, a person named Mark Knowles did. I'm just providing the link to his page for anyone who is interested. I've installed this plug-in on my Mint 6 system and so far it has worked well without any issues.
There are some drawbacks to this plug-in. One drawback is that it does not support more than two participants in a conversation like the actual MS OCS client. Another drawback is that you will not be able to join Live Meeting collaboration sessions either; but for the ability to connect to my office OCS server from Linux I am pretty happy with it so far.
The direct link to Mark's page is here: http://mknowles.com.au/wordpress/index. ... /18/pidgin
Pidgin and Microsoft Office Communicator in Ubuntu
For anyone looking for Microsoft OCS/LCS support in Pidgin, here is a debian package that you can install in Ubuntu. It has been tested in Ubuntu Intrepid on i386. It comes with no support, but I would like to hear if people are successfully using this package or if it is broken in any way.
This package is built from the sources at the SIPE project at http://sipe.sourceforge.net/. A big thankyou to Anibal Avelar aka “fixxxer”. I only packaged the project, so I cannot take any credit. If I’ve missed thanking/attributing anyone else, please let me know.
Download the package here: pidgin-sipe_1.3.2-1_i386.deb
Install the package by running the following command:
sudo dpkg -i pidgin-sipe_1.3.2-1_i386.deb
If you connect to a corporate server that runs Active Directory, the initial configuration can be a bit difficult to figure out.
Here’s a rule of thumb:
Basic Tab:
Protocol: Microsoft LCS/OCS
Username: Your Exchange email address
Password: The password for your domain account
Local Alias: Leave this blank, it’s not needed
Advanced Tab:
Use Proxy: Enable this setting
Proxy Server: Change this to the server your company is using. See note below.
Use non-standard port: This may be required. I have seen some servers run on port 5061
Connection type: SSL/TLS
User Agent: Leave as is
Auth User: The username you use to log into your domain (not your email address)
Auth Domain: The domain your Windows workstation logs into.
Determining your Server:
You can usually find out your server by typing the following command:
netstat -na | more
Look for any entries that have a remote address of 5060 or 5061. That is a dead giveaway.
Build instructions:
If anyone manages to re-build this package, some instructions would be good. I used a strange combination of a pre-built tar file and some portions of the git repository. It was difficult to reproduce, hence me sharing the package.