How do I lock down Spark?

I am deploying Spark and Openfire to my organization and I want to lock down what my users are able to do with Spark. Basically I only want them to have the capability to join a specific chat group. I don’t want them to be able to add specific users (contacts), or change any settings or customize Spark at all. I want them to join one specific conference group and that’s it.

Is this possible to do at all? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

I would also like to know what options I have if I want to lock down Spark. Is a custom build my only option?

/Daniel

most of this can be accomplished by the various plugins. the subscription plugin can restrict the addition of users to rosters. the client control pugin can bookmark and auto join at load of spark. etc. You have to use the plugins and the power they give you. as for preventing changes to spark. that is much harder due to the fact that each user controls their spark preferences. you could howver use a login script to replace it every time.

I’m mostly interested in removing the Advanced button and options from Preferences, such as Login Settings, File Transfer.

We are contemplating using Spark in a corporate environment, with SSO enabled and all options pre-configured at install. If we could remove the above settings it would limit the possibility of users futzing about and causing unneeded support costs.

Central administration of all client settings would be even better, but would probably require a lot more work.

/Daniel

If you are using SSO you need only replace the spark.properties at login and have spark configured to launch at login and autologin. File transfers can be blocked via the client control plugin.

That’s what we’re doing now, we’ll probably try setting read-only rights on the spark.properties file too, but a somewhat knowledgeable user will know how to circumvent it. I’m not sure I’d want to block file transfers, but it would be nice if we could make it harder for the user do change the preconfigured download directory path.

If it was possible to configure which menu items (and preferences) that were presented to the user it would simplify administration a bit. If it could be done centrally from the Openfire server it would be perfect.

/Daniel

I whole heartedly agree with your last statement. I would like to see more admin control of spark from the server. I think you will need a custom build of spark to do what you want.