MS Communicator(SIP) + Ubuntu 9.04

I found an interesting post this morning talking about using Pidgin on Fedora Core to communicate with a MS Communicator server. I was able to follow the instructions from Louis van der Merwe to get this working on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04.

First I downloaded the Pidgin client plugin sourceball from the SIPE Project, and started running configure --prefix=/usr to identify missing libraries. I installed the missing dependencies using sudo apt-get install intltool libpurple comerr-dev, other systems may require more or less. After configuring, making, and installing the plugin I fired up Pidgin.

The only modification I had to make to the configuration instructions was to use SSL instead of TCP for communications as we use a certificate at my workplace. Although contacts and groups were pulled in successfully, my presence notification doesn’t seem to work (I show up as offline). However, this is good enough for me right now and I’m really happy to be able to access the corporate communication channel in my primary development environment.

*Updated to 1.6.3*
Presence notification seems to be working now, thank you SIPE team!