2013-06-05

So you just finished signing up for service in the Chatmongers Cloud?  If you haven't signed up  already, do it now, it's free.  You will receive a confirmation email so that you can activate your service.

Now what?

When you registered a default organization was created as container for your XMPP domains. The name of your first organization is the same as your email address.  Inside this organization your first chat domain awaits.  Here at Chatmongers we try very hard to make provisioning instant.  If you can see it in the manager portal then it should available to connect.  From the main portal page open your organization page and look around.  There are three main sections on your organization page.  XMPP Domains, DNS Domains, and Billing information.

I'll talk about XMPP Domains in a moment.  DNS Domains are domains that belong to you.  In order to register a DNS domain you have to validate that you own it. Once you have authorized a domain for use in the Chatmongers system you can add it or subdomains of it as XMPP domains.

Under billing you can inspect your token balance information and see your organization's token balance.  Your first domain with your first concurrent user is free. Your organization is allocated 200 free tokens at the start of each week and these tokens are enough to cover the cost of running your domain for the week. These free tokens expire if they aren't used by the close of the week.

Ok, now back to what we really want to discuss. Remember that first XMPP Domain that we provisioned for you? You can find it in the XMPP Domains section. When you registered we created a subdomain of our own chatwith.it domain so can instantly get started. Subdomains of chatwith.it are always created with four random letters and are yours to use until you no longer need them. All you have to do is create a user and login.

To create an XMPP user go to your organization page and click 'edit' to the right of your chatwith.it XMPP Domain. For this example we'll use the domain kxgx.chatwith.it. The domain edit page contains a table of users for that domain, which will be empty for a new domain. In this table click "Add Users" and enter a username and password.  There is a minimum password length of 4 characters.  For this example let us assume that we created the user 'chatmonger' with a password of 'gochat'.

Now that we have the XMPP user 'chatmonger@kxgx.chatwith.it' and the password 'gochat' we need a client to connect with.  Around here we like Pidgin and Adium.  I will continue these instructions as if you have installed Pidgin.

When you launch Pidgin the first time it will prompt you to add your first account.  In the 'Add Account' screen you want to select 'XMPP' in the 'Protocol' drop down.  There are a number of fields that will appear.  The ones you really need to worry about are Username, Domain, and Password.  The username is 'chatmonger', the domain is 'kxgx.chatwith.it' and the password for our example is 'gochat'.

Congratulations, if everything went smoothly you now have a working XMPP client and account. Now all you need is someone to chat with.  XMPP federation is enabled by default for new domains so if you have any friends on Google Talk you should be able to add them to your contacts.  Once you are authorized you can chat with your friends on any XMPP federated chat service.  Otherwise you can create another user and add it as a second account in pidgin.  At that point you can send message back and forth to yourself.

Once you have validated connectivity you're ready to get to work writing and testing applications using the Chatmongers Cloud XMPP service.