after three years of partial use Openfire and Spark messenger along with Yahoo messenger I come to the conclusion that this is not right solution for our company. Public Yahoo messenger is forbidden due to security reasons and administration controll, but works perfectly. Openfire server seems to be good, but Spark messenger shows many bugs (problems with other LDAP users visible, roster actualization, wrong or nonfunctional presence status and some other GUI problems). Of course can be probably mistake on server side.
Before I must buy some expensive commercial solution (on example Microsoft Office Communication Server), is there any chance of final software product soon? Is great that Openfire is free, but we need 100% functional company solution. Openfire has been only my experiment, but have about 50 users now.
Like you, we have had no problems with Open Fire, but Spark does have issues. We have about 50 users as well and are now switching over to Pidgin as the local client and do not see the problems we saw with Spark.
You could always roll your own Pidgin installer package (or Spark, for that matter), which would allow you to limit what features are available.
There are some functionalities of Openfire that can only be utilized by Spark, such as Broadcast and FastPath. If you aren’t using these, a different client, like Pidgin, might be a good option.