We currently have Openfire running on our main domain controller and everything works well (spark clients).
We’re about to open 2 remote offices, one of which next week.
There will only be a small handful of people at the remote offices. The remote offices will each have their own server which talks to the main domain controller at head office. All machines are Win 2008.
Is it possible to setup Openfire on the remote server such that the people in the remote office login to their local server which also links to the head office openfire server?
If people in the remote office are talking/sending files, i’d prefer it was done locally on their network, and not passed back to head office and back out again.
Openfire has “Server to Server” option, though it is broken in 3.7.0 version. Check Server > Server Settings. I haven’t ever setup this myself, so can’t give you any direct pointers. You will have to add one server to another server’s whitelist and vice versa and use the same secret key. Then users from one server should be able to search and talk to users from another server and also join rooms on another server. Shared groups won’t work between servers. There is no true multi-domain support and it is not planned. Of course, communication between users on one server will happen locally on that server.
Using server-2-server in this architecture means that each office will have a different domain. If that works for you then it’s the best option since if the link between offices goes down then each office can still continue using the local server.
Another option is to use connection managers. In this solution, there is only one central Openfire server that means that there will be a unique XMPP domain and then each office can have a local Connection Manager where users can connect to. This solution was oringially created for scalabilty reasons since you are preventing all users from connecting directly to the server but since then Openfire was improved to scale to hundreds of thousands of connections so using CMs is no longer popular or even needed. As you can imagine, if the link between an office (ie. a Connection Manager) and the central server goes down then users can no longer chat.
CM is a better option than not having one, as there will be only one connection to the server instead of the 100 (if one branch office has 100 users), but it will still need to go outside even if you are talking to a user from your office. I’m right? CM won’t act as a mirror server.
I do not think group sharing works between S-2-S…though this functionality would be great! We only use S-2-S here for different companies (servers are on same site) as one of the sister companies needs IMs logged, while others do not. That being said, we have one connected to from all over the world. I have never really seen any performance issues with this, but granted, we only have small satellite offices connecting and not major branches.
That being said, our Armenian consultants sometimes have had issues getting dropped. But, no one in India or London has ever complained of this. I think the occasional issue with Armenia was an issue more with their network or ISP there. In fact, no one has complained of this in probably a year and they are required to always be connected. With modern bandwidths and IM requiring very little relative bandwidth, I think this is rarely an issue. I would think most companies with different branches would have pretty hefty pipes between offices or at least I would hope so for purposes other than IM.