So we have a group of Sales / Marketing guys … all have thier BlackBerry’s (mostly) and love to text msg each other on the road. I’m asked is we can extend the desktop (Spark) IM to a phone. I’m not any IM expert by a long shot … set up Openfire for internal use and it’s working great … now I guess I’m paying the price.
I loaded an app on my BB … IM+ which claimed to be Jabber compliant. I did some testing initially to my friends on Google (GChat) … so …
Has anybody done anything like this that might care to share the experience? Do I simply open some ports on the firewall to allow access to the Openfire server? Would that be enuf?
I take it you are using it “internally” only at this point? Are you using a domain name or a IP address after the @ sign?
btw… I’m not a openfire expert by any means, but I have a similar situation…
Your openfire server has to be exposed to the “world” somehow for it to work outside your LAN… If you are just using a internal IP address as I am, you can create a reverse NAT on your firewall / router which will translate an external IP address that you assign (if you have one available) to the IP address of your openfire server… Users out side your network would be able to use: theirjabberid@yourexternalIP The rule you create would also have the open the appropriate ports.
If you are using domain names or sub domains, then you have to have your dns provider create an A record pointing your domain name to that external IP address…
Someone please correct me if I am wrong. As is possible…
one thing I have found out is that most (all the ones I looked at) mobile IM clients (I only looked at blackberry compatible) had to proxy the connection. So my chat would have to go from my blackberry to their chat proxy and then to my chat server. We have a BES and I thought it would be able to connect directly but I couldn’t get it to work. I figured the bes would allow a tunnel from my BB to my internal network, which is does, but I couldn’t find a im client that would do this without proxying my chat conversations. Obviously for security reasons we don’t want any of our information flowing thru another provider like this.
What may work is a J2ME IM client application that uses http-bind (port 80 or 8080) instead of an XMPP socket connection on 5222. It will work on Blackberries with BES or even regular mobile phones. Question is: Does such a client exist??