Prevent Users from adding contacts?

I am wanting to prevent users from adding any contacts to their rosters. I only want to them to see what groups we put in…Is that possible?

There is no real way to prevent the users from adding people to their roster. You can use the Subscription plugin to deny all requests to add a user. This will only stop the non-persistent user from finding a way to chat with another user.

Thanks again MTS, I’ll look at that plugin…

That said, it seems like everything I think should be a feature in an enterprise IM platform is not available. This was the case when I used LCS 2003 and seems to be the case with Openfire/Spark. I want to be able to control nearly every aspect of the client experience. Perhaps if I read through all the forums I might find the features I need, but after playing with this for a couple weeks I seem to notice some features lacking and it seems that the development direction does not seem to focus on the client. For certain people/groups I want to approve/disapprove avatars, disallow changing of profile information, disallow roster changes, deploy through group policy (without needing to write custom scripts), not need 50MB plus memory for each instance of spark, control most Spark options at server level, log users out and restart the server services from the webpage, etc. etc. I could see if those options did not exist for 3rd party clients, but if spark/openfire are a team, I would expect them to act as more of a team.

This is not to say its not a great product, it is. I just don’t see how anyone can use this with more than 10 employees in the same building. I just feel like I have no control whatsoever over the clients. sure, there are policies in place, etc. but ultimately the only way to stop people from doing what they want is to remove those features. My wishlist grows every day it seems and with little development on the spark end, and on clients in general from what google is showing me.

You could use chat logging to keep the people in check. I find that fear of big brother goes a long way. We have over 120 concurrent users on a daily basis in my company. There is very little misuse of the product. If you are using AD you could always pre-configure the users Avatar in AD. There is a container there for Photos. If it exists I think Openfire uses it and can not over-ride it. As for installing via group policy, I just built a custom installer that adds all the config files and settings I need. The biggest hurdle with settings is that Spark does not adhere to windows conventions for the location of settings directories. This means you need a simple script to create a settings file for existing users. Yes the RAM is a little steep but changes are coming.

The best way to influence change is to become active in the wednesday discussions in Open Chat here at igniterealtime.org and submit requests for features in the Dev community. Become an active voice for change.

I have installed the open archive plugin and that seems to be okay. I am not so much worried about the content of chats, just want to control the user options and not let them change them.

Photos in AD - AFAIK, there is no way to put an image into their AD account via ADUC. Do you have to use adsiedit or something to accomplish this?

Custom Installer - is that posted in any of the previous discussions, I would love to get a copy of that and then suit it to our needs. Nice to have a starting point and not starting from scratch.

Ram - changes? How so? spark 2.5.9, 2.6, etc.? Is there a roadmap posted somewhere for spark development? Maybe we need to look at all the web client options and customize that as much as we can. When looking at jabber.org the web messenger I see there is great looking, but on the web jwchat, etc look really unpolished and I cannot justify the cost to upgrade to enterprise openfire just to get the web client. I guess I have been so spoiled using SugarCRM as their development is quite rapid.

Wednesdays, definitely will participate and voice my opinions.

Thanks again,

Ok to add pictures to AD I used DameWare NT Utilities. The custom installer is truly custom for our company (logos, etc). It was built with EMCO msi builder.

I can not give time frames for the development of Spark. There are some other opensource web chat packages as well (http://www.claros.org/web/showProduct.do?id=2).

Development used to be quite fast here too (it still is for Openfire). There was a changing of the guard recently and a refocus on other projects, but I hear rumor that Spark changes are coming.

Thanks. I look forward to trying both of those. I think the biggest difference between something like a sugarcrm and this is that nearly every time I would post a question, with proper detail, logs, etc. I would almost always get a developer in the thread at some point. Anyways, …

Mts,

Did you use the Starter version of the MSI builder or the enterprise version. I am thinking about trying it out and was curious about your experience with it. Will a custom installer for spark overwrite previous spark versions or do old installs need to be removed first…

Thanks

Wayne

I have the enterprise version. The MSI installer will overwrite previous versions as long as the version number is different. You may need to add som extra registry settings to the MSI to remove the Spark entry from add remove programs for the previous version. Personally I did not do this as it makes no difference to me.