Case Studies & Success Stories

I really enjoyed posting Daryl’s Openfire Success Story: Saving Lives with Instant Messaging. Anyone else want to do one?

Well, it doesnt save lives here, just eats our work time Joking. It’s only ~200 users deployment. Just internal communication, saves a lot of “walking to someone’s desk (or even next floor)”, “calling a phone” or “emailing ‘are you there?’”. But, when it goes offline (rare occasions) many employees become upset. So i think it’s worth of… ee… not actually buying anything

P.S. Dawn, is your account here ‘dawn’ or is my private messaging broken here? Have sent you few questions some time ago.

(blush) You caught me. I am way behind on responding to my private messages for Ignite.

We have a deployment that covers ~150 users. Our Company has offices in 13 states and employees that work out of their homes in several others. Our company is divided into Teams where members could be from several states. Spark has been deployed across the entire company allowing for quick conferences, individual chat, and personal use to a degree. The centralized receptionist can use spark to see if a user is free to take a call without putting the caller on hold. I have personally used spark to send critical files from home to a coworker. We were able to successfully integrate spark/openfire into our Active Directory 2003 network to allow SSO for all users. We use group policy to roll out updates.

The software has become so ingrained into our daily routines that people have turned the name Spark in to a verb. They will say they are going to spark somebody instead of IM or chat. When they are actively chatting is is sparking, and when there is that rare issue with the software “nobody can spark me”.

With all the support from the Jive members and Ignite Community my roll out from concept in April 2007, to our current status has been a glowing success. I have received much praise for the seamless roll out of an invaluable tool to our wide spread company. It could not have been done with out both great products, Openfire and Spark, and the support offered in these very forums.