Hello
This year we wanted to bring something new to out course platform at the Faculty of Automatic control and Computer science. The first thing that came up was the Instant Messaging feature that is into Moodle. With this feature a student can receive notifications from the course site in real time (most of them). If the user is offline it will receive the messages when at the first login. We what to create a chat room for each course where students to interact and to ask question about their assignments.
So we took one piece Jabber Server – Openfire – and one piece Moodle 2.1 instance and implemented the idea. It works quite well especially because we use a centralized authentication server (LDAP) and the student will use the same account on Moodle site and on the Instant Messaging service.
Openfire is quite a cool Jabber Server. It is written in Java and has a web administration frontend from where you can change the server settings, add users, monitor the server and so on. The setup was smooth. The only thing that might be improved is that it only supports one type of authentication system per instance: you cannot combine manual users with ldap accounts. Is or the one or the other. The lack for a cli tool to administer the service is also a minus, but you can hack the database, most of the settings being stored there.
As a client Pidgin rule. It is light im client that can be used will almost all the im providers out there.
We like to give it a try. You have below a print screen of a pidgin xmpp account setup. The username is the one you are using for the cs.curs.pub.ro.
Very good initiative you got out there !