I was demoing wildfire today at work as an alternative to live communications server, and of all things it got shot down because it doesn’'t work with the online status indicator in sharepoint.
From what information I’‘ve gathered, the online status indicators in sharepoint are actually rendered on the client-side, via an active-x control. (They don’'t show up at all in Firefox, for example.)
I’'m wondering if anyone else has ran into this issue? The only solution I can think of is some kind of spark plugin that would hook into the same activex control as the real MSN client and provide online status that way.
there is a Presence Plugin for Wildfire which allows to show the online status as an image or XML within random web pages. I’'m not sure if this matches the sharepoint feature.
The sharepoint functionality is rendered on the client side. However, as you correctly state in your post, it uses the Office DLL to show presence information, as well as calendar information, the ability to send them email etc.
I looked into this, and the only ‘‘good’’ way of doing this is to rewrite the functionality of the Office 2003 DLL (which perhaps talks to the wildfire presence service).
However, this looks extremely hard to do - we decided it was not worth the effort required.