Schema For The Presence Plug-In - Netscape DIRECTORY SERVER 6.1 - ADMINISTRATOR Administrator's Manual

Schema For the Presence Plug-In

Making the presence information available via a directory provides an easy,
efficient, and unified way of looking at a user's online status. In organizations
where directory is generally deployed to store user-profile information, presence
information can be added to the directory schema and the online status of users
becomes available to everyone within the organization without having to worry
about the details of how this information is queried or obtained. The information
can be returned in response to any query involving users. This makes it possible for
all employees, for example, to get presence information for all members of a
department or all members in a locality without each employee having to create a
buddy list.
When you install Directory Server, the Presence plug-in is automatically installed.
By default, the plug-in is enabled and is ready to use. All you have to do is add the
default presence attributes to a user's entry. Once this is done, when queried, the
plug-in will serve the presence information for that user.
The online status of a user is made available in the form of text and as a binary
value (a GIF image). The returned values for the binary return type can be
configured based on vendor support, and the values returned for text status are
ONLINE, OFFLINE, or ERROR.
NOTE
Schema For the Presence Plug-In
As indicated in the overview section of this chapter, in order to represent IM
presence status, the Directory Server schema must be updated. When you installed
Directory Server, a schema file for Presence information was created:
serverRoot/slapd-serverID/config/schema/10presence.ldif
494 Netscape Directory Server Administrator's Guide • August 2002
The IM status attributes are defined as operational in Directory
Server, which means that they are only returned in response to a
query that explicitly requests them.
When querying presence information for IM users, no presence
information will be returned for any IM users who have blocked
access by any other users; each IM service may return a different
result, such as OFFLINE or ERROR.