We use office communicator at work which is a bit of a pain because it doesn’t log anything. If you want to save your conversation you will need to resort to the old copy and paste trick. Nothing as nice as Pidgin’s log option.
So I’ve gone back to Pidgin and installed the SIPE extension. Its a really usable extension but sorting out the configuration and dependancies can be a bit of a pain as it is not yet in a repository. Basically its an old fashioned download – configure – compile – install problem.
First getting the latest version can be a little tricky as it appears that the project web site is not always in sync with the source. When I looked the latest vesion advertised on the project home page was 1.5.0 but 1.6.1 was available from here. Admittedly 1.6.1 is only alpha but hey you’d think they’d advertise the bleeding edge for those of us who live there.
At least all of the dependencies are available through yum for Fedora. There are no way out libraries required. But to find out all of the libraries to install you may have to run configure a few times. Just remember you may have the run-time of any requirement installed but you’ll also need the development version installed too to compile against.
For me I also needed to add a couple of switches to get the beastie to compile properly. So the configure command ended up looking like this:
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-quality-check=no
Once this is complete then you can make and make install the plugin. Note that you will need to run the make install under root.
Creating an account was a matter of using the add functionality from the modify account dialog. Choose the ‘Microsoft LCS/OCS’ variant and set up the account details. In my case I didn’t need a proxy and by default the connection trys to use SSL/TLS which I didn’t want so I switched it off to TCP, the Microsoft default. The username is your base email address, not your alias and the login is your domain login details. Remember to set the server too and it should be all ready to go.