No more hiding in the server room

Internal / Private Chat System - Thumbs up for OpenFire

Was looking around for an internal chat solution and was pleasantly surprised by Openfire

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Permalink Reply by Paul Stoklosa on April 13, 2009 at 8:12pm

yes, Openfire is great! Works as a gateway to aol, yahoo, msn, google, and others.. I set it up to replace a barracuda IM device that I didn't want to continue paying support on. The only downside to openfire is that it isn't very robust in the logging/reporting.. Technically it logs everything into an xml file.. but if we wanted to see someone chat activity over, say the past 2 weeks, and export to a file, it's not easy at all. there's some addins that i tried but nothing that really nailed it.. hard to find all the addins too..

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Permalink Reply by Rob Butterworth on April 15, 2009 at 4:32pm

I'm a great fan of Openfire also. The client that igniterealtime offer, Spark, is pretty nice too, and has some cool features (centrally managed bookmarks, cool shared whiteboard plugins, etc.) - you can, of course, use any jabber client.

I used to run on Windows 2003 Server, and we were having some odd 'contacts ghosting' issues, but since we rebuilt on a debian box and upgraded to the latest spark beta version, it's been very solid - possbily not due to the move from Windows Server, but I wanted top free up the OS license anyway.

I used to run a Lotus Sametime server, which wasn't too bad either and had (partially) working web meetings too, but I've no idea why I would do that these days with a nice AD integrated openfire server (we can run DimDim if we want to hold web meetings, or just use the free/cheap hosted service). The only thing I miss from Sametime days was the integration with email, letting me see the online status of contacts from my inbox, start chats from there, etc. Not a big deal, really.