Is there any of the current Spark developers who would work for $$$ to make some feature enhancements to Spark?
I’m not committing to it - but want to know if the possibility is out there. I’m thinking about abandoning Microsoft’s Live Communications Server in favor of Openfire / Spark.
When adding users to Spark using an Active Directory user lookup - add them by Full Name to the contact list initially instead of JID
Integrate Outlook calendar (in meeting until 5pm, etc…) information into Spark
Outlook integration may not be possible as it would require licensed code from Microsoft. This is an opensoource product. As for the other question if openfire is configured correctly this can be done already as long as you delete the autopopulated nickname field information. This causes spark to query AD for the nickname information. Also if you use shared grooups to populate rosters they will always display correctly.
there are free Java libraries available which offer good Exchange integration. Anyhow I have no idea about the quality of http://sourceforge.net/projects/j-xchange/ but it sounds promising.
@Charles: You could ask @Ryan Graham / version2software while there are also other freelancers who need some peanuts to eat. Writing some Java code which uses the Openfire API and an Exchange API is not really a big deal for good Java coders.
I would just like to point out that Exchange was never mentioned. He said Outlook. Outlook can be used with many different types of servers, and the data can be stored local or on the servers. I am aware of the opensource projects available, however as many old threads have indicated integration into exchange is
A. going to be dawnting at the very least
B. for some features you would need to license MS APIs for exchange.