Internal Chat and MSN –Use Openfire!

Openfire

The control of chat and online conversation tools,and mainly MSN,is one of todays challenges for organizations. However just blocking the access to this tools isn’t always the right solution as they also serve professional productivity,client,supplier,collaborators and employee communication.

The free access to this tools isn’t also advisable,since it’s frequent to mix work and leisure. The solution is installing an internal corporate chat server,which will allow the communication between employees and collaborators,whether they’re in the same building or in different countries. But we still have to deal with MSN…a frequent tool in so many places. No problem,just install a communication gateway. Clients? Easy,install yet another plugin and you can use online chat web conversation with them. And all that with total control and conversation logs.

Interesting.. how about the costs? …Zero! Nothing…All that’s available by the software Openfire,a chat server developed by Jive Software and made available in the company’s community site (Ignite Realtime) licensed under the Open Source GPL. Besides it uses the XMMP communications protocol (known as Jabber).

Openfire can be installed in Windows or Linux operating systems. It supports many database options and Active Directory integration,it also has many available plugins that add functionalities to the chat server.

I recommend to install Openfire on a linux server (I personally like Debian/Ubuntu distributions) and MySQL database. It’s necessary the server’s hostname to be resolvable by DNS if you’d like to be able to communicate with other servers or the Internet. After installation you can log in to the administrative panel at http://server_name:9090/ to create users,groups and install plugins.

I recommend the use of the Gateway IM plugin (allows communication through MSN,ICQ,Gtalk,etc),the Monitoring plugin (Chat control) and Fastpath (for who wants an online live chat service). To control MSN one would just block its service through Firewall,only allowing the chat server to communicate with MSN. The login information for MSN should be done by the sysadmin directly on Openfire’s management console,that way the employee won’t have the login information and won’t be able to use the company’s MSN register from outside the company. Through the monitoring plugin it’s possible to monitor all conversations (including MSN).

Spark

As a client for the Openfire server I suggest Spark (a client developed by the same organization and also Open Source GPLed). There’s also SparkWeb,which allows a worker to conect from any computer without having to install any client using a browser.

Good chatting!