Can anyone suggest a book that might be helpful to a newbie trying to get his head around the whole OpenFire IM project?
This is my first encounter with an open source app and have been spoiled by the documentation that comes with most applications.
I am not a techie but really would like to get a handle on how the OpenFire/Spark system works.
I did find one book… Openfire Administration: A practical step-by-step guide to rolling out a secure Instant Messaging service over your network by Mayank Sharma on Amazon. I was hoping to find an OpenFire For Dummies type of book, but haven’t seen anything like that.
None that I am aware of. It will get you going. It just will not cover all aspects of the current version of openfire. You can read my review in more detail here: http://www.innersanctumcomputing.net/reviews.php
I started looking for a book, and found the same book, published in 2008. Has anything been released since this thread? I was reading the documentation on the website, but it’s all about installation, and then development. I need something that covers administration.
Hm, what happened to the “admins never read manuals”? Honestly, Openfire is often admired for a super easy administration, and not without a reason. Even installation is pretty straightforward. Well, it was long time ago, when i first started, but i don’t remember reading anything about the administration. You login, start clicking on the menus and find Users and Groups, create a user, a group, login with that user, etc, etc. It just goes naturally. Of course there are some complex things in the Admin Console, but most of the time you won’t need them. And when you need them, you go to the forums and ask “how can i achieve this and this”. Not saying that documentation is not needed. It would be nice to have, with screenshots or even videos. But nobody here has time to do this. So i encourage to give it a try.
Honestly though, setting up and running a basic Openfire system is really, really simple (thank you devs!). More advanced things could and should be documented better… perhaps you can help out once you get familiar with running it?
Absolutely. The install was straightforward, it’s troubleshooting tasks that I wanted to get more info for.
For example, AD integration was a nightmare. It’s up and running with two groups of users, but I just added another user to one of the existing groups, but it won’t let them into a ‘members only’ conference room. They are members of all the same AD groups, so I can’t figure out where I need to check on the server to make sure they can access the conference room.
I figured, if there was a book that explained ‘adding new users’ or something to that effect, I’d go straight there and go through the steps as a checklist to make sure I didn’t overlook something.
I was afraid AD integration will come up I tried it once and it is a mess and a nightmare. I’ve decided that a few minutes spared to create a local user are not worth this, so i stick with the local users. One has to be an LDAP guru and then know about Openfire’s AD integration tricks and bugs. Such a book would cost a lot And it can be outdated soon if something changes in AD integration code.
