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OpenFire and Spark offer secure private chat and collaboration tools
If you're looking to implement a secure, private chat environment in your company, have a look at what's going on at Ignite Realtime with their OpenFire real time collaboration server and Spark cross-platform IM client.
Being that they are open source, both OpenFire and Spark are free; that makes it easy to convince management to give it a try.
But the open source nature of the products also means that if they almost but don't quite suit your needs, you can always modify them to fit the bill.
Ignite Realtime also hosts a number of other related projects including SparkWeb, Smack API, Tinder API, Whack API, and XIFF API. If you're an IT manager or developer looking to implement a secure private chat environment, have a look at OpenFire and Spark.
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsEponFeb 2nd 2010 5:37PM
Implemented this in our offices with AD integration. Works great. I'd love to see VNC be implemented into this as well for a remote support solution that doesn't suck.
Level 5Feb 2nd 2010 5:37PM
My company has used Spark for the better part of a year and a half. It works fantastic. Very versatile software.
Annoying PosterFeb 2nd 2010 6:51PM
while its nice that it is xmpp based and is therefore compatible with other im servers, the fact that it runs on java is an instant fail.
my team uses jabberd2, which is written in c and very lightweight, and everyone uses pidgin as the client. no problems here and also supports AD if you want to configure it that way
timk0013Feb 2nd 2010 10:59PM
my company has been using this for almost a year and a half, only had to reboot it twice (for version upgrades).
rock solid and very fast! I would highly recommend it. We use psi-im.org instead of the Spark client though.
EponFeb 2nd 2010 11:11PM
Yeah not gonna lie... this isn't 1999. VM's can handle basic tasks like this pretty damn well. It's not like it's sorting thru 1,000,000,000 double-precession values.
tracker1Feb 2nd 2010 7:52PM
@Annoying Poster, to be honest, I'm not much of a Java guy, but aside from the initialization, which tends to happen on app-servers once in a blue moon, the performance of Java or .Net based apps tends to be near, and sometimes faster than C/C++ equivalents. Let alone development time/cost.
Drew GreenFeb 3rd 2010 7:22AM
OpenFire is great. We've also been using it for about 9 months with AD integration. Spark (the client) worked fine on XP for the most part, but it's got some bugs on Windows 7. I've got my users that run 7 using Psi (like someone mentioned above), but I prefer Pidgin on my machine, and will probably switch them over to that when we roll out more 7 boxes.
Drew GreenFeb 3rd 2010 7:23AM
One more thing: Spark hasn't been updated in a very long time. There are unofficial builds that are taken from the SVN, but there is no official release in the past few years.