I am investigating an alternative to commercial solutions for instant messaging for a client. Jabber seems to be a simple but effective solution.
The only question I have is if I can push the list of users entered in the server (buddy list or roster or friends list or whatever you want to call it) to new users without the end users having to enter the whole list manually? This is key to convincing my client that an in house jabber server is the way to go - they already told me not to waste my time with jabber as a solution if this small thing cannot be accomplished.
Thank you, terminology was different from what I was expecting, but I found the answer. Now if my terminal server problem can be resolved, I should have a go ahead for the software.
Could you elaborate on how this was accomplished? I’'m guessing all you have to do is dump your roster into the jiveRoster and jiveRosterGroups tables in the database. Is that how it is done? If so, after users are entered into the roster are they pushed out automatically to clients? Also, if the db editing is the solution, what is the relationship between jiveRoster and jiveRosterGroups? Thanks.
or if you have a windows active directory domain (or any ldap for that matter) you can authenticate openfire against active directory and publish your active directory groups as buddy lists.
Can you provide specifics on how to do this. I have OF setup and integrated with my SBS2003 AD, however I need to automatically populate each Spark users contact list with all AD users
Thanks for the reply. I come to a dead halt at the instruction to “Create a GROUP and put the contacts you want in the roster”. I see no opportunity to put the contacts in the roster - near the bottom of the page it says "No members in this group. Use the form above to add some. " I see no “form above”. I must be missing something very obvious, however this is where I am stuck - everything else is quite straightforward, it is simply that I have no place to put the members into the roster.
Now if my terminal server problem can be resolved, I should have a go ahead for the software.
What’'s the problem you are trying to resolve? I finally gave up on running Spark in TS, and instead ran it on the individual workstation. Works much better that way that I thought it would.
Objective - To set up OpenFire so that client PC’‘s have all Active Directory Users prepopulated when client PC’'s open Spark
The problem I am having - After following the suggested procedure, when i open a Spark client, all I see is the shared group, but the newly shared group has no contacts in the list. When i go back into Console to address this issue, I see nowhere on the page for sharing groups to add actual users into the group. I only see the form for sharing a group.
So how do I add all of the individual contact to the shared group so that when the Spark client is used for the first time, all of the contacts are prepopulated and ready to use.
When you share your Active Directory Group out to your clients… they won’‘t appear in the list until they are signed on. When they aren’'t signed on they are bundled in the offline users group… which may or may not be shown depending on how you have your client setup… maybe this is where you are running into trouble?
It works great for me…
I have a Distribution Group setup in AD for all of our users names “Company Name”
I went into openfire went to groups and viewed groups and found the group “Company Name”
I thien Enabled Contact List Group Sharing
I Clicked Share Group with Additional Users
and choose all users (which should already be populated with all of the users from AD)
I hope that helps… and I’'m sorry you are having so many troubles. It has worked quite wonderfully for me!.
I’'m still a newbie to openfire, but I hope this reply is useful anyways…
If you haven’'t already, try setting the group provider in conf/openfire.xml to be LdapGroupProvider. That will cause openfire to look for groups in active directory instead of its local database. Then it should be able to match that the users coming from AD are part of an AD group.
If I have Johnny, Sallie, and Sue as AD users and all part of the AD group “OfficeA”, Openfire should find the OfficeA group from AD and know that they’'re part of it.
Then, just enable sharing of the AD group (OfficeA in this case) from the wildfire admin interface. When Johnny logs in, he’'ll automatically see Sallie and Sue (and vice versa).
If you ever add a new AD user “Bob” and place him in the OfficeA AD group, he’‘ll show up in the roster as well (once you restart Openfire or just wait a while until it to reloads its LDAP info). When he logs in, he’'ll see Johnny, Sallie, and Sue.
For good documentation, check out the LDAP guide (especially the Group Settings section):
Thanks guys - I was making this more complicated than it is. Your detailed explanation allowed me to see thru my fog and indeed this work great and makes sense. Iwas getting thrown by the percieved need to manually add users to a group in OpenFire, but of course, this is done in AD and then it just flows to OF.