How can an ejabberd newbie setup a fully functioning ejabberd server?

i am completely new to ejabberd. I have downloaded the installation for both windows and linux (Ubuntu). Somewhere on the web i had seen a demo of how to install and set it up but the installation was configured as a 'demo'. I have the pidgin XMPP client and now am having problems setting up ejabberd.
Another issue is that i have tried to develop chat systems with Nitrogen's comet pools and erlang ETS tables on the backend (thanks to the failover mechanism embedded in ets tables now) i.e

ets:give_away/3  [it gives my chat engines fault tolerance, thanks to the guys 
who maintain the virtual machine who saw how useful this is]

Can we have Web interfaces to ejabberd servers, putting aside its admin interface. Nitrogen Comets are quite cumbersome sometime forexample, the browser time out especially in Nitrogen 2.X.X can not easily be changed.
So now i have decided on ejabberd. How can i customize an internal organization chatting system using ejabberd as the backend engine. I wouldnot want every one in the organisation to download Pidgin as a client but want to embed the chat functionality in the web interfaces.
With Erlang, Yaws, Mnesia, Inets, Mochiweb e.t.c i have no problem so even if it requires me to develope an erlang application with a few Gen servers on top of ejabberd, that wont be a problem

Please point me in the right direction to get ejabberd up and running. 
On the processOne Website and the ejabberd documentation i have still 
failed to start it well. Please help

Solution

If you are a newbie and want to setup and ejabberd server, you should simply use hosted version of ejabberd. You can easily create your own domain on http://hosted.im

You should be up and running in minutes