We’‘re very keen on implementing this in our establishment, and are currently testing it out. I’'d like to know if it is possible to see every user on the list of “buddies” so that from a tech support point of view I could very easily contact them if they were online?
Often we have support requests but we cannot tell whether the user is online or not, we send emails but they don’'t necessarily check them. So the chat is an ideal way for us to check if they are online and quickly send them a message.
For small numbers of people, doing this by hand might make the most sense. But larger numbers are harder. Openfire has the concept of shared groups which might be able to provide some of what you are looking for. But perhaps better still is using the http presence plugin with your external users’'s database (I presume you are using an external database or LDAP). With that you could have a web page that lists all users and their status.
Also, using the Contact Group Sharing settings, you can define a group of people who should be able to see all users and then share your All Staff group with the members of that group