Office Communicator and Linux

As with most things in tech, large companies catch on to the power of instant messaging late. Where I work is no exception. They rolled out Microsoft Office Communicator a couple of months ago (as a side note, that is a horrible landing page) and made much of the new and improved power of communication between employees. It’s a great thing that I can finally communicate using instant messaging, but the proprietary software threw a monkey in my desktop setup. After some research I found out how to get my desktop to connect to the Office Communicator server: Pidgin and SIPE.

First, I needed to install Pidgin

sudo apt-get install pidgin


Then, I installed the TLS plugin for Pidgin

sudo apt-get install pidgin-encryption


Now, the important piece of the puzzle was SIPE, which is needed to connect to proprietary server. I initially tried the usual

sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe

But the version of SIPE available for jaunty was version 1.2-1 and it didn’t work. So, I went with the old school way of compiling my own binary. I got the code from here and followed the simple instructions on the same site. They are as follows:

tar -zxvf pidgin-sipe-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd pidgin-sipe-1.7.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
sudo make install


Once installed, I started up Pidgin and after entering the necessary info connected successfully. You can see the detailed info of what I entered in the pictures below.