[TriLUG] IM server solution for MS Messenger clients

[Cristóbal Palmer]

On 9/5/07, Jeff The Riffer <riffer at vaxer.net> wrote:
>
> Purely political reasons. Without going into detail, I'm trying to circumvent
> territorial folks who would throw a screaming fit about changing the end-users
> desktop config.

Do the end users have any control at all over what they get on their
desktops? If so, read on. If not, plz2ignorekthx. Without knowing the
political landscape, it's hard to know how to help you argue for what
you'd like to see.

Identify the cool kid(s) and win her/him/them over on Pidgin. If you
can't do that, figure out who can. Don't push Pidgin on people; figure
out how to get them to demand it. It's really pretty awesome software
when you think about it, so that shouldn't be terribly difficult if it
gets pitched to them right.

In my mind I hear you say, "But they're Neanderthals! They'll never
listen." If you've ended up there and can't have good,
mutually-respectful discourse with them, then your problem is not a
software problem and no software, no matter how good, will fix it.

Next question: why the desire for in-house chat? Was that your idea?
If so, what problem are you trying to address? I'm asking not to be
snarky but to save you headaches.

When I showed up at ibiblio, this is what I found:

* a wiki page listing people's chat nicks and associated networks
(often several for a given person)
* people using a mix of gaim, adium, google talk embedded in gmail
* no in-house chat server
* one coworker passionately opposed to the idea of in-house IRC

I decided to make it my mission to win everybody over to at least
using the campus jabber, jabber.unc.edu. I failed. I failed because,
in the minds of my coworkers, there wasn't a real problem that needed
to be addressed, and jabber.unc.edu didn't add any compelling
functionality for them. I think it's fair and okay that I failed to
win everybody over, though most of the office does now at least sign
on to their jabber.unc.edu accounts, so if I choose to, *I* can talk
to them over the campus jabber.

So! Provide your users with compelling functionality or convince them
that the problem you see really is a problem and the change won't be
painful. If you don't get buy-in from the people they all respect,
give up.

That's my rant. Maybe I'll write a book...

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal M. Palmer
celebrating 15 years of sunsite/metalab/ibiblio:
http://tinyurl.com/2o8hj4