New feature: Queue Selection

[DerikB]

Any chance we'll see the new queue selection feature for other chat
clients? I have a lot of colleagues that would love that one, but they
are all the ones who use a client so they can monitor personal
accounts too.

-Derik.

[Pam Sessoms]

Derik,

We'd really like to bring this feature, and other special LibraryH3lp
features, to external clients in a graceful way. A relatively
complete answer is unfortunately kind of long and involved, but here
goes.

First up, users of external clients can *sort of* do queue selection
now in two ways.

1) If using a multi-account client like Pidgin (multi-protocol), Adium
(multi-protocol), or Psi (jabber-only), you can pretty much do the
same thing by assigning users multiple LibraryH3lp accounts. Then,
assign the accounts to different queues using whatever staffing model
you need, and train the users to enable and disable their different
accounts to suit different purposes.

2) Users can select queues in the webchat client, since the queue
settings stick with the user until they re-set them deliberately,
again using the webchat client. So, they'd sign into the webchat just
long enough to select the desired queues (and de-select the queues not
desired), then they'd logout of the webchat client and login to their
external client. They can also probably sign into the webchat at the
same time as they're signed in with their external client long enough
to pick their queues, but it's a bad idea in general to stay signed
into the same account in two clients as a general practice.

Obviously, these solutions aren't quite ideal, and #2 in particular
will be error-prone since users may not remember the state of their
queue selection between logins, and they do not have an easy way to
check in their external client.

SO. How about making queue selection work nicely in the external
clients themselves? This gets into a lot of the design philosophy
behind LibraryH3lp.

One of the design goals we had with LibraryH3lp from the beginning was
to limit customization of external clients to plugins. LibraryH3lp's
predecessor, pidgin4lib, was a fully customized Pidgin client, and it
was a pretty big ordeal to keep it updated, patched, and correctly
configured across all the computers required for NCSU, UNC, and Duke.

With LibraryH3lp, the only customized external client piece is a
plugin for Pidgin, and this plugin has continued to work with all
releases (so far, knock on wood) of Pidgin. The unfortunate part of
Pidgin's plugin design is that it's really hard/impossible to modify
Pidgin's GUI in a plugin, so we can't make big, friendly buttons
inside the chat window to support advanced LibraryH3lp features.

Now, the good news! The XMPP (Jabber) protocol standards are full of
very nifty things, and these standards actually provide for all kinds
of things that we do with LibraryH3lp (transfer, queue selection,
various other commands).

So, why aren't the external clients able to do these things already?
It's because most Jabber clients do not actually implement all the
required standards to make these things work.

The client that comes closest right now is Psi, a very heavy-duty XMPP
account for serious Jabber people. It only works with Jabber
accounts, so users can't also be signed into their personal AIM, etc,
accounts with it. In fact, Psi already supports libh3lp transfer (but
recipients of transfers do not yet receive the full roll-back of
transferred chats), email transcript, and tag for followup. Even with
Psi, queue selection doesn't work quite yet, but this is because of an
Ejabberd (libh3lp's Jabber server) bug, not anything lacking in Psi.

A long-term LibraryH3lp goal is to try to bring Pidgin into better
Jabber compliance with these extended standards, so that it can be
used more gracefully with advanced libh3lp features.

To try to sum up, these sorts of features will hopefully be available
in at least some external clients eventually, but it's a long road.

Hope this helps!

Best,
-Pam.

[Derik Badman]

Thanks, Pam. Understandable on all acounts.

I hope you'll let us know when queue selection does work in Psi. That would be really helpful for us, as our university is using Google Apps, so Psi would work for our GoogleTalk as well as LibraryH3lp.

I'll have to do some testing with it.

--
Derik A. Badman
Digital Services Librarian
Reference Librarian for Education and Social Work
Temple University Libraries
Paley Library 209
Philadelphia, PA
Phone: 215-204-5250
Email/GTalk: dba...@temple.edu

"Research makes times march forward, it makes time march backward, and it also makes time stand still." -Greil Marcus