I’m looking to use Open Fire on a medium sized business network, but I have a few technical questions.
First, what are the minimum system requirements (RAM, CPU, HDD space, OS, etc.) for the host server and also the clients that the application will run on?
Second, are there x86 and x64 versions of the host/client? Can we mix and match these if they exist? For example, have an x64 host and x86 clients?
Third, we have mobile users that connect to our network through a VPN. However, we don’t want them to have to connect to the VPN to login to Open Fire. How do we accomplish this?
Fourth, is there a way to sync with Active Directory?
Fifth, I am wondering if there is a way to have other applications communicate with OpenFire. Specifically, we have a network automation tool called ActiveBatch that allows the quick creation of scripts. Is it possible to create a script within this program that can send a message through Open Fire to other Open Fire users? I was thinking I could create an ActiveBatch Open Fire account for this purpose, and use your API to send messages through ActiveBatch/Open Fire.
here’s all the openfire documentation. Since Openfire and Spark are java applications, it should run on most hardware platforms with little trouble… including 64 bit or 32 bit.
There is AD integration, although some people have had some issues configuring it. There is documentation for that as well, and there are some recent threads in the forums detailing some of the pitfalls and solutions.
You can easily punch a hole in your corporate firewall and allow OpenFire traffic through… meaning external users can point Spark to your corporate public ip address and it will connect.
OpenFire and Spark use the XMPP standards, meaning there are a lot of things you can do with both software. Both are aimed not only at regular users, but also have corporate use in mind from the very beginning, meaning there is a ton of flexability. Both projects are FOSS under the Apache 2.0 license, and source is available from the downloads section. You are free to tweak both applications to your need and compile your own custom versions – even brand it to be your corporate IM client if you choose…
I think most people have found that Openfire scales much better from a *nix (Unix of Linux) server platform… however I think this is the case with most applications… *nix is just plain better (i’m bias! lol).
I’ve heard of ActiveBatch before… its similar to AutoIT for scripting routines easily. You could either have it run a client of Spark on its own account and use direct keyed input to the chat window, or you can dig deeper and integrate it further by using XMPP. There are a lot of pre-made XMPP bot programs out there that you could check out and borrow logic from.