Jabber via Wildfire and Spark
Posted by Andrew
I recently had the opportunity to research and implement a complete instant messaging system for the company I work for. We wanted to enable users to communicate more easily, but also needed to be able to have control over who they could talk to. All public networks were out, there seemed to be two main options. First, since we run a Microsoft Windows based network, we could have used Live Communications Server. The second option, and the route we ended up choosing, was to go with a Jabber based solution, hooray open source! After doing some reading, it became clear that Jabber would be more flexible, and would work well for us. I began looking at the different Jabber server implementations. The most exciting was an open-source project, Wildfire (soon to be renamed Openfire), a project backed by Jive Software. In addition to the Jabber server, the Ignite Realtime project maintains a very clean Jabber client called Spark.
Wildfire integrates with our Active Directory via LDAP. I was very impressed at how easy the system was to install and setup, the Java based server runs as a service on our Windows Server 2003 R2 machine, and leverages our existing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 installation for its backend. On the client side, user are able to authenticate with their Active Directory permissions. To top it all off, in addition to those in their department, a Help Desk group is automatically added to each user’s buddy list – very cool!
