OpenFire Integration Capabilities

Openfire Openfire Support
1

I am in the process of evaluating open source IM solutions for my firm and I was hoping to get some feedback from the community on some specific capabilities of OpenFire. I am looking to accomplish the following and would like any feedback from anyone who has tried to implement something similar.

Will OpenFire integrate with a portal solution such as Cisco’s Quad solution?

Can specific user IM groups be created? Can user (non-admin) also create and manage those groups?

Does OpenFire support nested groups (groups within groups)?

Can administrative communications or notifications be sent to all IM users and/or Groups?

2

  • Don’t know anything about Cisco Quad, but after checking it briefly it looks like a web based collaboration platform, similar to our site (Jive SBS platform). Cisco has bought Jabber Inc few years ago, so it may be using jabber/xmpp protocol, same as Openfire. But only Cisco can tell is it possible to combine it with Openfire. Openfire is using jabber/xmpp standard. But i see that Quad already has chat capabilities, so why do you want a separate chat solution?

  • User groups are supported. Role based administration is not supported. This means that any user can be added to Openfire administration, but they will all have full admin rights.

  • Openfire doesn’t support nested groups directly. Usually this can be achieved on the client side. Group can be named in a specific way so it will virtually appear as a part of other group in the client. For Spark you have to use " :: " when giving a sharing name to a group. E.g. naming a group as “first :: second”, will make it appear as a group “second” inside the “first” group. Other clients have other special markings. Spark has some bugs with nested groups though.

  • This is called a broadcast and it is possible to send such message to all Online users from the Openfire’s Admin Console, also broadcast can be send from a client. When send from the client there can be a group or user selection (like in Spark). Also there is a Broadcast plugin for Openfire, which can let you use specific addresses to send such messages like group@broadcast.server, also it lets setting rights for broadcast sending, but it can’t control client’s internal broadcasting features, only when using broadcast addresses.