I currently have the Openfire server set up on a Debian box, and we are using it for internal communications. So far, it’‘s been very easy to use and I’'m quite pleased with the interface.
One of our goals with setting up the server is to eventually allow our customers to use the system to talk directly with account managers and support supervisors, but we want to make sure that those users can communicate directly with only the users we specify. Is there a way to do this using Openfire, either within our single instance, or using a tandem server? I don’'t see any obvious way to accomplish it.
Well, it’‘s not just wanting customers to be able to message us at their convenience, but also wanting a mechanism for sending messages out to them. So a web solution isn’‘t exactly what we’'re looking for here.
What we do want to be able to do is make sure that only the users we want them to be able ot see are ones they are able to see.
I know I can turn off the directory search and only show them specific contacts with group sharing. But is there any way to prevent them from sending messages to users they don’‘t know, if they deduce the user name? (we’‘re using a standardized format for user names, so that wouldn’'t be hard to do.)
As privacy lists are controlled by clients this is not really an option, but if one would extend Openfire to allow to set fixed privacy lists for random clients this could be an alternative.