We recently migrated from ejabberd to Openfire 3.7.1, and have been trying to figure out how to allow users to move/arrange buddies from an LDAP group in their roster to other groups, like ejabberd did.
More specifically, we have an LDAP group that contains users that we want all users to have as buddies. We have it setup and the users show up as a member of that group as expected, and they see other members of that group automatically as they are added.
The problem comes when users try to arrange the users in this group to create roster subgroups as they each prefer. Openfire doesn’t seem to allow this, and always forces the buddy entries to be a member of the group they were populated from, they cannot be moved to a different roster group. We understand that LDAP is read-only from that standpoint, and that’s fine.
All we care about is that every user in this LDAP group exists in every users roster, but we don’t care (and don’t want to enforce) how they are arranged/subgrouped. Is there some way to do this in Openfire? If not, is there a way to hack/extend it so this is possible?
We’ve found a pseudo-workaround (although it has some annoying drawbacks) in that users can create duplicate buddy entries into other groups in their roster. But this means that the original LDAP “group” doesn’t shrink to contain only the new entries that people haven’t yet organized, so finding new users is difficult when that group contains hundreds of users, and the users can’t be sure they didn’t miss copying someone into other groups without a lot of tedious back-and-forth checks.
Thanks!