Is this the solution we are looking for?

Openfire Openfire Support
1

Hello I am researching open source IM servers for internal use in our company of <100 employees. I have been reading about Openfire for a few days now, I found it as a recommendation on experts exchange.

I do have a question that I am not sure there is a solid answer to. I am required to find an option that allows management to browse, search, and read all message logs between employees. I know it is not a normal situation, but there are legal reasons why they need to, and there had been issues in the past with misconduct via IM.

Reading a few topics there seems to be some confusion, and conflicting thoughts:

http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/164553#164553

According to that the log isn’t searchable, and nothing new posted on it in 2 years.

http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/188498#188498

says that it didn’t work, and there is mention of the enterprise version. Is that the paid solution, or a version no longer available?

http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/124377#124377

Says the option no longer works with newer versions.

I apologize, but this is a requirement in the solution I find. Would anyone be able to clearly clarify if this is possible in Openfire?

Thank you.

2

Hello,

Your situation is actually quite normal. The posts you linked to are a bit old so the information contained with them are a little out of date. The enterprise plugin that is referenced is no longer available but the majority of the functionality that it provided was split into multiple plugins which are freely available to download and use. The monitoring plugin is all you need to capture, store and search messages.

To see if Openfire meets your needs I would suggest you download and install it, load the monitoring plugin, add a few accounts and begin experimenting.

Good luck,

Ryan

3

Thank you for the quick reply I appreciate it. I am working on trying to test it right now, but we are a small company with limited resources. I’ll see what I can do in hte next few weeks.

One last question if you don’t mind…

What client do you recommend we deploy to our users?

4

Hi,

install some clients and ask your help desk to test them and to decide which client the users should use.

Do you need vCard/avatar support? Do you need file-transfer support? Do you need a client with a small memory footprint (Spark uses 50-100 MB.)?

LG

5

I AM the help desk lol. We are a small company, less than 100 employees. I have an IT manager, but that’s about it. All we really need is plain text chat, as our building is a bit spread out, and some of the staff that need to communicate regularly are hundreds of feet from each other.