Administrative assignment of Avatars

Openfire Openfire Support
1

Hello, I know this is probably a strange question; but, I work in a corporate environment where we are looking to deploy Jive Messenger along with an XMPP client such as Pandion, GAIM, etc. I would like to know if there is a way to restrict what avatars, or forcibly assign avatars at the server level. This would allow us to restrict the size and content of the avatars being used such as not to offend other users.

I’‘m assuming there is some sort of database entry or object associated with this as one of my pilot users created a “headshot” of his from an existing photo and then assigned it as his Avatar. This avatar was then available to all users; as far as I could determine. We would not want users to be able to change their avatar to represent someone else’'s picture for example.

My goal would be to have a ‘‘headshot’’ picture taken of a user by our HR department (used for ID badges/Corporate Announcements/Employee Profiles) which we could also use as an Avatar for the Jive server.

Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly welcomed. Thank You for your time.

2

Hey Bradley,

Currently Messenger does not have support for url=http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0084.htmlJEP-0084: User Avatar[/url] so I guess that the image is being published using other mechanism.

So I suggest identifying the XML packet that the client is using for publishing his avatar and then add a PacketInterceptor that will reject the packet if the avatar size is greater than the limit.

Let us know if you need help writing the PacketInterceptor.

Regards,

– Gato

3

Hi All,

I don’‘t want to step on any toes but unfortunately since the goal to limit both size and content a pack interceptor is probably only going to get him so far. I know Bradley was looking for a server side solution but as Gato pointed out since Messenger doesn’'t support User Avatars a real elegant solution may not be possible right now. Two solutions I would investigate would be:

  1. Contact some of the client developers and see what would be involved in having them tweak their client to prevent/limit user avatars to meet your needs.

  2. Implement JEP-0084 yourself. This could probably be done as a plugin which is something I could help you with. Of course, it maybe necessary to also write an interceptor that blocks clients from exchanging avatar information.

Hope that helps,

Ryan