Hi, I’'ve just spent a few days playing around with jabber… and Jive + spark was a perfect fit for what I wanted to do. I am now wanting to deploy it to my whole company - over 2000 users. But I was very dissapointed to see the Spark client has no option for system administrators to deploy with - a ‘‘silent install’’. Trying get 2000 people to all take up Instant Messaging as a collaboration method in my company would be impossible, without having it just ‘‘appear’’ on their desktop.
There are a few jabber clients that support this, but I none off them have the rich V-Card functionality I like with Spark.
Please add this functionality to future versions! I guess for now I will attempt to create my own installer from the post-installed product.
Guys, Spark is looking better and better with each release! Keep up the great work!
I too am now looking for an effective way to deploy Spark to a large number of clients. I am in an AD domain so typically the easiest way to do this is with an MSI package or another wrapper. I tried -q per the docs but it still dumped me to the welcome screen.
That’‘s because I sadly didn’‘t specify it in the installer. However, I’'ll try and get the 1.0.2 release out there as quickly as possible. You will know when it is released when the bug count = 0 in the 1.0.2 queue
Now that I think about it… Would it possible to have everything configurable from the silent install option?
As it could get long winded using command line parameters, it may even be better to have a seperate .cfg file for the deployment settings.
Things of particular importance to me, and probably others are;
Install location
Default Jabber server
Launch on Startup setting
Start in system tray setting
Spark user settings location[/b]
The users roaming profile directory is IMHO a bad place to put settings of any size, such as XML chat history! We prefer to place ‘‘user settings’’ for other programs on a network share if possible.
Our corporate WAN can be slow in some areas, and keeping roaming profiles clean and trimmed is hugely beneficial to the user’'s domain logon times.
Does the version of install4j that you are using have the capability to create an MSI package as well as the installer .exe? MSI packages drop right into group policy objects in Windows active directory domains.
The key thing I’‘d like to see with the -q option is to be able to set the default domain, but also to be able to specify the connect server, as our Jive server doesn’‘t resolve in DNS to the same thing as the Jabber domain we’'re using.
Being able to push some of these other options would be excellent as well, but those are the two that’'d be critical for me.
I’‘d also like a package that you can set some default settings (primarily the server, but other settings would be nice as well). An msi package would be ideal in our environment, but not necessary. I’'m curious if it would be possible to specify an default settings.xml as an option for the command line.
By the way, excellent job so far, can’'t wait for the API.
Hy. I had (or better said have) a similiar problem. I found a solution to set the default settings (default login-name, jabber-server, nickname). That was done with a VBS-Script. You can review the code at: http://www.sperrgebiet.org/misc/sparksettings.txt
just save it as vbs and modify it for your needs
Just for my own defence => i’‘m not a developer I’‘m sure it’'s not clean code, but it works
I also made a Spark MSI for my needs but i had the problem that i wasn’‘t able to add a custom action to run the script after installation. (i found a couple of tools which provide such a function, but i doesn’'t work for me).
We currently deployed spark with a batch-job which installs the unattended msi and after that run the vbs. it works fine.
editing spark.jar is easy but repacking it back into an exe with a silent install option that can be deployed with openfire is the real issue. I can pack it into a silent install MSI but openfire cannot deploy an MSI.