Customised Corporate Deployment

We are in the final stages of evaluting Openfire/Spark combo.

It looks like we will roll the client to the whole company. Since we have over 500 machines this will take a bit of work, so is it possible to create a package with the settings we want eg, load on startup, login with user ad credetials etc etc and then deploy it.

The deployment is fine since we will use Landesk to do that, however I do not know how to make a custom install of a spark client.

Any help is appricated

Thanks

Kimbie

This is much more complicated than you may think. Spark unfortunately creates its settings folder in the root of a users profile, and the settings are per user not system wide. This can not be targeted directly via a msi installer. For this reason you will need to created a login script that the machines run when each user logs in that will create the spark folder and copy the spark.properties file to the folder. Next would need to configure SSO. There are many threads discussing this process. Lastly you will need to build a custom MSI that will include all the registry settings and config files for SSO and Spark itself. I have attached as many of the files as I could for your to look at.

Thanks for that. I can automate the creation and copy of files via Landesk.

Obviously Spark is the prefered client, but is they any others out there that work with OpenFire and give a better enterprise admin experience?

Thanks

I am currently evaluating Openfire+Spark to be used for my corporate network. I used Openfire 3.5.2 rpm and a modified Spark IM Client 2.5.8 from svn. I also tried looking for Spark alternative but I failed because most of the other client are bloated with some other stuff. I find Spark client useful and good for corporate use. It has features that I need like drag and drop of files and you can send screenshots using Spark. Unfortunately I am not able to do testing audio/video capability due to some problems I am encountering at the moment.

I spend most of my time modifying the Spark client even though I’m not a Java programmer. I successfully removed the conference tab and modified the default properties of spark which can be found at layout.properties, spark.properties, group.properties. Although I encountered different kinds of bugs while doing modifications, they’re all minimal.

I’m just wondering if how can we get the Spark 2.6.0 beta from svn as I only saw 2.5.8 in the tags folder.

Hi Dave, I came across your question about the Corp Deployment. Im doing the same thing I also have LanDesk can you explain to me what you had to do and how you went about it to make this work for SSO so users have to do as little as possible. I’ve tried to create a batch file off of a share and deploy an MSI I made that looks at the properties files for SparkIm and copy’s that to the users profile. Its not seeming to work very well. Can you help or tell me what you did to get this work.

Thx.