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Chats in spaces, projects and social groups

Posted by dombiak_gaston on Jul 7, 2008 3:56:13 PM

In my previous blog posts I talked about Connecting a chat client to Clearspace and Scheduling chats in Clearspace. Today we are going to explain another usage of Chat inside of Clearspace.

Lets say that we create a new social group that can be seen by anyone and anyone can join the group. As described in Connecting a chat client to Clearspace, I can use my XMPP client to log into Openfire using my Clearspace credentials. I will then see in my roster (aka contacts list) the newly created social group and its members. From there I can easily tell if they are available, away, unavailable, etc. If I want I can start a one-to-one conversation or even send messages to offline users knowing that they will get them when they come back online.

A room in Openfire was created when we created the social group in Clearspace. Rooms are also created when you create new spaces or projects. So what are these rooms? These rooms are defined by XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat and will exist as long as the social group, space or project exists. When someone tries to join the room, Openfire will ask Clearspace if that user is allowed to join the room. Clearspace will check the user permissions on the social group, space or project to answer that question.

Most XMPP clients allow you to browse rooms on the server. This is a very convenient way for users to discover rooms and join them. As we said, Clearspace has the ultimate control on who can join which room. Once in the room, everything that is said and information about users that join and left the room is stored in Clearspace. The chat transcript and presence information is updated every minute in Clearspace. It is also immediately available for searches.

Besides being able to join from your XMPP client of choice you will also have the choice to join the room from the Clearspace site. When you go to the page of the social group, project or space you can customize it to have a widget that will show the room activity (without actually joining the room). Users can then click the join button to actually join the room and participate from the widget. Beside the widget option we also provide other ways to join the room from your site.

Moreover, just like you can do in youtube.com it is also possible to copy some HTML instructions to embed the chat widget in your site outside of Clearspace. You can even pass the user/password from your site to the embedded widget so that the user does not need to log in again. However, if no user/password was passed then the widget will ask the user for his credentials before joining the room.

3,807 Views Tags: clearspace, integration, rtc, openfire

Comments (14)

Jul 18, 2008 3:32 PM

rmonge says:

This is exactly what I've been wanting to do for a long time with openfire and forums. Making a web page a place where you can gather, see presence and that can remember realtime conversations. The web is a place.

from webmobs

the internet works exactly like the real world: people who are in the same place at the same time can see each other and talk to each other.

Jul 29, 2008 7:09 PM

dillera says:

Is this available in CS 2.0.x or only 2.5.x?

I've connected OpenFire to my 2.0.5 CS instance, and I'm using Spark-web to login now.... however, I don't see how to get the roster w/ your friends/social groups/chat rooms ready to use... the spark-web interface is just empty and I have to add people to an empty roster.

Jul 30, 2008 10:01 AM

dombiak_gaston says in response to dillera:

Hey dillera,

CS 2.0 and OF 3.5 allow you to have the same list of users, profiles, avatars and authentication credentials. Social groups is part of CS 2.5 so pre-populating rosters is not possible with social groups. However, CS 2.0 is using the administrative groups you define in the admin console of CS as the shared groups in OF. If you go that road you should know that you will need to recreate the groups once you upgrade to CS 2.5.

Regards,

-- Gato

Jul 31, 2008 4:21 PM

sparker says:

I cannot tell you how much we're looking forward to the "embedded chat widget" in 2.1 (whoops, I mean 2.5).

Right now, we're investigating Meebo.com, etc as a temporary solution, but are really looking forward to using a secure, local, captured, indexed and most importantly LOCAL chat server (we're using Openfire internally)

Sep 4, 2008 11:44 AM

sparker says in response to sparker:

Has the "embedded chat" that was planned for 2.5 been pulled from the feature set? I've installed 2.5rc and can't find any reference to it anywhere, nor can I find it on the plugin site.

Am I looking in the wrong places?

Thanks,

Steve

Sep 9, 2008 1:05 PM

RobAlexander says in response to sparker:

Gato, Daniel has mentioned this feature will now be delivered as a plugin instead of as part of the core product. Can I please get a rough estimate as to when that plugin will be available? We've been waiting with bated breath for this.

Sep 9, 2008 1:32 PM

dombiak_gaston says in response to RobAlexander:

Hey Rob,

I cannot find the link to the post made by Bill Lynch where he explains what happened with this feature. In a nutshell, the feature was not ready for prime time (e.g. wasn't polished and complete like we wanted it to be) so we decided to postpone it to mid 2009. I guess that if you contact PS you might find a solution for your needs that could work out sooner than that.

Besides the polishing work we decided to go after the correct solution and that implies improving the plugin framework and making Clearspace more extensible so new content types could be added and treated as first class citizens. This means that after we are done with the feature it will just rock!

Sorry for the delay and miscommunication.

Regards,

-- Gato

Sep 9, 2008 2:04 PM

sparker says in response to dombiak_gaston:

We're bummed to hear this, as the FastPath / Clearspace integration isn't working either, and has been pushed "to an unscheduled future release". That means that both of our plans for Clearspace centric chat/discussions are now gone... Integrated discussions are critical to our use of the community.

C'est la vie. I'll see if we can hold off deployment for another year...

Steve

Sep 9, 2008 2:13 PM

RobAlexander says in response to sparker:

I echo all of Steve Parker's first paragraph. However, we at WGU can't hold off deployment for another year, especially with the lack of resources Jive is putting into the Spark desktop client or in integrating the SparkWeb client with Clearspace. Very disappointing.

Sep 9, 2008 2:16 PM

dombiak_gaston says in response to RobAlexander:

Hey guys,

I'm sorry for this situation but we didn't want to release something whose quality was not as high as we wanted. I would recommend contacting PS to see if something can be worked out.

Regards,

-- Gato

Sep 9, 2008 2:17 PM

dillera says in response to sparker:

Yes, I'm really dissapointed here also. What am I to say? "the chat stuff I said was coming in 2.0, that was then coming in 2.1, which became 2.5, well, you see, that's all gone now and won't be here for a year."

You see, I don't care if it rocks or not, I'd just like to have it working, you know, actually in the release. This was the big thing everyone's been waiting for- chat integration.

Sep 9, 2008 2:20 PM

dombiak_gaston says in response to sparker:

Hey Steve,

I'm curious what is not working in Fastpath when integrated with CS. FP should work no matter the backend for users that is being used. Do you have a link to the issues you are seeing?

Thanks,

-- Gato

Sep 9, 2008 2:21 PM

RobAlexander says in response to dillera:

Yep, dillera, I'm taking a lot of heat on this, too, from my employer. Especially with our annual licensing renewal approaching.

Sep 9, 2008 2:24 PM

sparker says in response to dombiak_gaston:

Gaston,

Here's the URL: http://www.jivesoftware.com/community/thread/29602?tstart=0

Steve