Prevent users from adding external IM

[Daniel Atallah]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 4:50 PM, Daniel Lopez <DLopez at lonestarlegal.org> wrote:
> Greetings, I was wondering if there is a way to customize the installation
> to prevent regular users from adding external IM services to the Pidgin
> client such as AIM, gtalk, msn, yahoo, ect? We have an internal XMPP IM
> server (OpenFire) linked to our AD with LDAP and would like to limit the
> users to just that.

No, this isn't really possible.

I assume that this is on Windows, in which case, you can delete all
the protocol plugins apart from the XMPP plugin (libxmpp.dll) and it
will eliminate support for other protocols, but you're not going to be
able to prevent people using other XMPP accounts (like Google Talk).
There also will be nothing preventing people from putting back the
plugins (either in the global location or in the user-specific
location).

A more appropriate way to do block access to services that you don't
want people to access would be to use some sort of firewall to prevent
the network traffic.

-D