alex July 22nd, 2008
Found out this morning that the OU are going to be trialling unified messaging with MS Office Communicator. Up until now we’ve basically used email (and occasionally the phone!) to get in touch with colleagues, but we’ve never had any actual presence information alongside this - so you’re not sure if someone is actually in the office or away on holiday (people don’t always turn on their out-of-office auto-replies).
Some of us use MSG for getting presence info to see if people are around and available and having quick chats, but there hasn’t been a big take up in the organisation for using instant messaging (well, not for work anyway!). So I wonder how much the instant messaging aspects of Office Communicator will actually get used. I guess the integration with Outlook/Exchange would have a big bearing on this. If you know that someone is in the office and free you might just call or IM them instead - so maybe we’ll see a reduction in the number of emails flying around?
Not sure what all of this means for MSG and FlashMeeting (Office Communicator also has video-calling) - though I’m sure they’ll live on, especially for communicating with people outside the organisation.
alex April 25th, 2008
I’m surprised it’s taken them so long… (admittedly it might have been there a little while and I just haven’t noticed!)
Will have to investigate and see what it’s actually built in, whether you can log in using a different client and if you can add contacts from outside FB? I suspect that you’re tied to using their client and your only contacts are your facebook friends.
alex April 24th, 2008
“Does MSG do multi-user chat?” is something we’ve been asked about countless times, and our response has always been no, and we’re not intending to add this feature, on the basis that many other clients already offer this functionality and we’re not here to reinvent the wheel.
Well, this is only partly true! The MSG web-client interface doesn’t offer the facility to create and join chat rooms, but the server that MSG runs on does (OpenFire Jabber server). This means that if you have an account on our MSG server, you can log into this account with another Jabber compliant client, which does have chat rooms.
Liam and I have been trying this out this morning using the Pidgin client (he’s also just had a meeting with few people using it) and all seems to be running well, these are the steps you need to go through…
- Create account on MSG (use the register link)
- Install Pidgin and connect to the msg server (msg.open.ac.uk) using you rnew username and password
- From the ‘Buddies’ menu in pidgin, select ‘add chat’
- Create a name for your room (only seems to like alpha-numeric characters, so no spaces)
- Fill in the options you want, or just leave on the defaults
We found the ‘invite’ function a bit flaky (didn’t track down the exact cause or where it was going wrong), but you can just give people the name of the room you’ve created for them to join.
Any feedback/comments etc welcome 
alex December 11th, 2007
New MSG login page
MSG will now accept OpenID Identity URLs to log in with. When you first log in with your OpenID identity you’ll be asked if you want to associate your OpenID with an existing MSG account, or you can create a new MSG account (without a password obviously!) .
As far as I’m aware MSG is the first instant messenger system to offer open registration and the ability to login with an OpenID identity (feel free to let me know if I’m wrong about this ;-))
I also have an OpenID server up and running (at: http://openid.open.ac.uk) and anyone is free to sign up for an OpenID identity with it, but please bear in mind that this is still an experimental service (I’m still tinkering!)
Next steps are some more testing and then having a look at trying one of the PHP OpenID libraries running as a consumer (plus making this blog OpenID enabled…)
