I was trying to find a e-mail contact to send in some feedback to however was unable to do so.
Figured posting here would be the next best thing.
The company I work for has been asking for a means to disable MSN in our company and that was easy enough through a few policies and firewall rules.
The harder part came when our support users started saying “We need chat to communicate” and this was a problem. I searched around for a few different solutions, one was full anonymous access however I was unable to find a decent solution that looked the part and had file sharing etc.
The other solution that seemed to get a lot of Hype was ejabberd and I spent a long time working on ejabberd and attempting to integrate with Active Directory to allow for easier authentication for the users etc.
In the end it was all for nothing though as it didn’‘t seem to work… It wasn’'t giving me any error messages I could follow up on either.
Through my googling I ran into a few people comparing WIlfire vs their ejabberd installation which for them both were working.
I then went back to Jabber.org and saw Wildfire listed with a high recommendation and I noticed second time round that ejabberd had “LDAP” support but not “NT Domain” support like Wildfire had (even though I read people were using ejabberd with Active Directory fine).
Man what a difference let me tell you what you probably already know. A nice user friendly interface which was not as impressive as an actual TEST link on each Active Directory configuration page… I finally knew my ejabberd settings were correct and Wildfire was up in minutes.
Now that was the first part, after trying to get Exodus and Pandion working without success they kept hanging on some sort of TLS problem I read the Wildfire site and found “Spark” which looked decent and what can I say, worked pretty much out of the box…
Although the Interface could be organized a bit easier for the corporate users it does the job and we now have an internal chat server in place and MSN will hopefully be disabled next week.
No more excuses this time I feel. So thank you again Ignite/Jive Software for creating this kick ass product for free none-the-less, I will definately be looking into the Corporate version to see if it has benefits we might be able to use such as a “DMZ” allowing certain people access into our chat network such as distributors etc and also if you had remote desktop support this would most likely be sold, we had nothing but problems with Net meeting.
In any case enough ranting for now, thank you take care and keep up the great work.