Digital Prank

One might have encountered lot of private and public chat and real-time communication services like Yahoo! Messenger, IBM Lotus Sametime, eBuddy, AIM etc in the internet as well as in the corporate networks. But most of them are not opensource solutions and you need rights to customize them to suit your own needs. Openfire IM previously known as WildFire and Jive Messenger is a great opensource alternative and a highly customizable solution to those applications  which can be used in corporate environments.

Openfire IM is a real time collaboration (RTC) private chat server is a cross platform instant messaging solution that uses XMPP (also called Jabber) protocol written in java. Openfire is highly customizable and it comes with a Web-based administration panel to configure and administer your messaging server. The server also comes with support embedded (HSQL DB which is automatically configure) or external DB which can be configured through administrative console/administrative panel.

The web based administrative panel can be used to add users or add plug-ins. One need to configure the server before setting up or managing the user. The problem with the current version of Openfire is, it needs a system restart to login into the web panel once the configuration is done. Otherwise the server will not allow you to login as admin as it needs a restart. Hope this will be rectified in the future versions. Also Openfire has lot of plug-ins available to increase the usability of your IM server.

Once the server is configured and installed then Spark IM client needs to be installed in all the user machines. Use the server’s IP address and user credentials to login and use the client to do voice chats, file transfers etc.Spark features built-in support for group chat, telephony integration, and strong security. It also offers a great end-user experience with features like in-line spell checking, group chat room bookmarks, and tabbed conversations making it a complete solution.

Openfire and Spark is supported by a huge community and there is a continuous development going on which makes this software more reliable equivalent to any commercial IM solution available in the market.