Want to chat?
No, not with me, how about each other? Everyone has an AIM account, maybe even a Yahoo one too. The problem with all of these accounts is your are known by names like starblade2000 (my brother-in-law) or jimmyvPSU (me). Wouldn't it be nice to use your Penn State Access Account in a secure manner to chat with other Penn Staters? Well folks, guess what? We have resurrected our old Jabber server. Back in the day the Jabber chat only worked by logging into the portal (https://portal.psu.edu/ ). Now we have a new service (that's in alpha/beta), that is load-balanced, secure and uses Kerberos. All you need to do is point your favorite Jabber client to chat.psu.edu. Your jabber id will be your access-id at chat.psu.edu (jvuccolo@chat.psu.edu is mine). By default we are set up for TLS and SSL, so all of the chats will be secure. Client-wise there are so many out there to choose from (iChat, Adium, Spark, Fire, Pidgen to name a few). In addition, because its jabber, you can inter-operate with people who have google talk ids, jabber.org ids and so on. We also have a conference server up at conferences.chat.psu.edu. Again, try it out and see what you think...
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Very cool! Talk to us about what the big advantages are to this. Are there ones outside of identity?
I was very pleased to see this project be resurrected. We've been using it to chat internally in ANGEL Support and, aside from a few subscription oddities, have had no issues with it. Is there any documentation available for the conference server? I have a few ideas for using it.
Well, some of the advantages are:
1) The chats are secure (SSL/TLS).
2) Using Penn State identity of course is pretty big. You know who are talking to.
3) Jabber is a very well known protocol that is used by a large number of higher ed institutions.
Hi Jen, right now we really do not have any documentation on the conference server. Its use will depend on which chat client you are using. Adium does things differently than Pidgen for example. If you want to know more you can talk to Derek Taylor (det135@psu.edu).
Sorry if I missed this point above, but Is this only for use in ITS?
No, anyone who has a jabber identity may chat with Access Account holders. A number of people have used it at conferences at other schools. What we have right now is alpha/beta, that is why there has not been a widespread announcement about it. I just wanted to let people know that we have Jabber again. We used to have a closed version of Jabber that was only accessible from the Penn State Portal. The new service, chat.psu.edu will work with a variety of chat clients.
Great news! Will we be able to chat with folks at other universities as well? Perhaps if they use Jabber?
Yes, as long as they provide a federating jabber service. Most schools do this, and we provide it ourselves. It will also enable you to chat with people using services like Google's Chat.
Has anyone found a client that supports GoogleTalk, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and jabber so you don't need multiple chat apps loaded on your machine? Those seem to be the big 5, so if there is one someone has already had success with, please let me know.
Yes, there are a couple of them out there that support multiple protocols. On the windows/linux side, pidgen supports all of the ones that you mentioned. On the Mac side, adium supports them too.
Other than word of mouth, is there any where to find out who at PSU is using this? Jackie
Hi Jackie,
Yes, we plan on doing an announcement probably before the Fall semester. Our efforts as of late, have been mainly focused on the PASS migration. In our group, that has pretty much involved all of us. Now that the migration is behind, we can tie up some loose ends with projects like chat.psu.edu.
Thanks,
Jimmy.