Corporate Installation Enhancements

First up, great product at great price!

I downloaded Openfire and had it up and running within 10 mins. Great!

I downloaded Spark in MSI format for trial deployment to a few Windows PCs on my corporate network, not so great.

Enhancement Requests:

  1. Allow the default server to be set in the MSI as a Property field using a MST so that a Sys Admin can configure this and save each user asking me “What is the server I’'m meant to use?”

  2. Integrate NTLM authentication to allow single-sign on in a Windows LDAP AD environment (Win boxen and Win serven) and allow this authentication to be set as default in the MSI so that every user does not ask the next obvious question “What username and password do I use?”

  3. Allow default locations (eg. the folder to open when sending files) to be set in the MSI as a Property field using a MST. In my situation I do not allow users any access to the local C drive and therefore the “Send files to this user” feature does not work as it tries to open %userprofile% by default.

  4. Allow all users to be added as friends by default at first startup as an option in the MSI as a Property field using a MST. My collaboration environment is simple, all staff should have all other staff on the local Jabber server added as friends by default.

Basically, the setup I’'m after is as follows:

a) Install local Openfire server and set Active Directory as LDAP authentication

b) Customise all Spark options as Properties in MSI file using a custom MST built using Orca or some other tool.

c) Deploy Spark using Group Policy.

d) When Spark starts user is automatically logged-in using NTLM single-sign on authentication to known local Jabber server

e) All staff are already added as friends so no “Add friend” steps need to be performed and users get straight into IMing

I’'m sure that such a scenario for deployment would be welcomed by many Sys Admins managing Windows-based environments as at least a basis for further customisation.

Simon

  1. SSO is already supported. There were couple of threads about this in forum.

  2. No access to C at all? Is it really has to be that way? Or are you keeping user profiles somethere else and Spark is still pointing to C?

  3. Openfire supports LDAP, there must be article about this in Documentation

I think all steps should be possible in one or another way right now. But MSI setup is lacking a lot of stuff indeed.

  1. Login Screen > Advanced > SSO (should be a line in options file to turn this on)

You can do all this already with a simple login script as part of your group policy to write the correct values to the Spark config file, and the Openfire ldap correctly setup with Active Directory. Myself and many others have posted on here about how to do this in the past.

Ben

Or just build another MSI file.

We currently do a load of user config and customisation in an MSI file that we deploy using SMS

How do you do that exactly, i’‘ve been looking to customize the MSI and i haven’'t had much luck. Can you point me to a place where i can learn how to modify or add items to the MSI so i can do the same? Thanks

  1. SSO is already implemented, although not with NTLM, but Kerberos. It’'s not a simple process though, requiring an extra .ini file and a registry entry added at the client. But SSO is still new, and the process should get easier with future versions.

  2. This feature is included in Openfire, when using LDAP. You can set Openfire to populate rosters by LDAP or AD groups. We have everyone in an “Instant Message” group.

I’‘ve repackaged a Spark MSI with the krb5.ini and the registry entry needed for SSO, along with a default config file including server name and SSO settings that gets installed into the Default User profile that first-time users of a PC will get when they first login. I push that MSI out through GP. And I wrote a script to copy the default config into existing profiles using login scripts. We’‘re still testing, but it’'s working great so far.