A great book about installing and administering Openfire has been released: Openfire Administration, by Mayank Sharma (a contributing editor at Linux.com). Some of the topics covered:

• Installing Openfire
• Administration of server settings and users
• Integration with Active Directory and LDAP
• Tuning Openfire for large numbers of users and high performance
• Enterprise features like logging and auditing
• Much more...

So far, I've only just started reading through the book in detail. The writing seems to be clear and detailed, while keeping a light-hearted tone. I also love the fact that the author includes lots of pictures -- it makes understanding some of the administration tasks much simpler.

We're thrilled to see the first book about an Igniterealtime Open Source project. If you get a chance to check it out, please let us know what you think.

The Fastpath product allows a company to provide support through the web. Users can use their own XMPP client or the provided web client to initiate a chat request. The request will be routed to the proper queue and agents will be offered the chance to answer the request.

Today we made the source code of the web client part of Fastpath available and a new version was released with the change in the license. You can download the new version from the plugins page.

Use the following SVN access to get the source code of the web client:

svn co http://svn.igniterealtime.org/svn/repos/fastpath/webchat/trunk webchat

The web chat client relies on the workgroup API that has not been moved to the open source repository yet. That is our last task in this long process of making Fastpath open source.

Enjoy,

  -- Gato

We are pleased to announce the release of Openfire 3.5.1, now with even more openness!  This release represents the first stage of the Enterprise plugin split into open source plugins.  We're very excited to be able to provide these to everyone for free, and seeing what the community does with them, both in terms of contributed code and use case scenarios.  So lets talk about some specifics.

New Plugins!

• Monitoring: Adds support for server statistics and chat archiving and reports.

• Fastpath: Support for managed queued chat requests, such as a support team might use.

These are the first two pieces of the open sourced Enterprise plugin.  Client management is coming very soon, as is clustering.  SparkWeb will also be released tomorrow as a separate product.  So you might be wondering, hey, why is there an Openfire Enterprise 3.5.1?  Well, due to the lack of all of the plugins being available right now, we've provide 3.5.1 for existing enterprise customers to make use of.  It includes some important clustering fixes though!  (as will the clustering plugin when it is release)

Important, Seriously, Pay Attention, Read This

Big Connection Manager Improvements

The connection managers have been updated to bring HTTP binding up to date and a couple of library upgrades that include a number of improvements.  It is important to note though that the conf/manager.xml file has been updated and you will need to update yours as well.  The new http binding section that you will need to add is described here.

Ok Fine, Where Do I Get It?

You can download Openfire 3.5.1 here.

You can see the entire changelog here.

You can view the documentation for 3.5.1 here.

Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.

As you may have already seen, Openfire 3.5.0 was released today alongside it's good friend Clearspace 2.0!  We are excited to put out this release as it strolls alongside a number of new announcements, new features, and is sporting a brand new outfit in the form of a new look and feel for the admin interface.

Now, in light of the announcements regarding the Enterprise plugin becoming open source, you may be wondering why you can see an updated Enterprise plugin available.  We are providing this plugin for our existing enterprise customers until the separate split-up plugins are released.  Those of you waiting for the open source releases, please stay tuned!

For our Clearspace customers, this new version of Openfire integrates at a much more intense level than before.  Instead of simply providing presence to Clearspace, and requiring you to point both Clearspace and Openfire at something like LDAP to have the same login setup, you can now have Openfire speak directly to Clearspace.  It will pull it's users and groups, as well as pass authentication through Clearspace.  Setup is a breeze, as you have one screen of setup in Clearspace and one screen of setup in Openfire and you are done.  And we're not stopping there.  Future releases will include even more integrations between the two!

Is Clearspace integration the only new thing in Openfire 3.5.0?  Of course not!  We've now got the ability to disable accounts, security audit logs for admin events, easy to take advantage of invisibility, and did I mention the pretty new admin interface?  We went over a lot of these new features in a previous blog post, so I won't bore you with a complete rehash of all of them. 

One word of warning, due to the nature of CSS not wanting to easily refresh itself, you may need to shift-reload in your browser for the new admin console to look correct.  And don't forget to update your plugins after upgrading to 3.5.0!  Some of them are affected by API changes!  (specifically: User Search, IM Gateway, MOTD, and SIP)

This has been a very exciting day for us here at Jive and we hope exciting for you as well!

You can download Openfire 3.5.0 here.

You can see the entire changelog here.

You can view the documentation for 3.5.0 here.

Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.

I'm happy to announce that we're making most of Openfire Enterprise Open Source! First, a bit of context: for the past couple of years, one way that we (Jive Software) have monetized our Open Source work on Openfire and the other projects on igniterealtime.org has been through Openfire Enterprise. Openfire Enterprise addresses the Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) market by adding rich reporting, archiving, and control features on top of Openfire. Since we released Clearspace last year, Jive has become super-focused on social collaboration and communities. That's pretty different than the EIM market and it's become increasingly difficult for us to serve both markets with our limited resources. Instead, we want to focus our Openfire work on real-time social and collaborative features and monetize our Open Source efforts through Clearspace integrations.

Existing Customers

Discontinuing a commercial product is always a difficult decision and one of our biggest concerns is not leaving existing customers in a lurch. We'll continue to provide support for Openfire Enterprise through existing support contracts and believe that making the Enterprise components Open Source is the best possible outcome for customers given the options. We remain strongly committed to the Openfire project and are pretty excited about what's coming in the future.

A Few Details

Gato will have a follow-up blog post with a lot more details about what we're releasing as Open Source and how, but I wanted to highlight two items. Sparkweb is our flex-based web client based on XIFF and will become Open Source. The client is already very feature rich and polished, and we're actively making many code improvements to it, as it's a shared code base with the real-time client features we're building into Clearspace. Second, the clustering functionality in Enterprise will not be made Open Source. Part of the reason for this is that we use a third-party commercial library for clustering  that can't be Open-sourced.

Let's Go Get 'em

One of our hopes with this move is that the last possible objection to deploying XMPP-based instant messaging at every organization in the world is now removed. Now, everyone will have access to an open standards solution that satisfies all the needs of IT departments... for free. We think that's great news for the community and getting our technology deployed even more widely is good for Jive Software as well. We hope you'll join us in spreading the word.

Most every day, the United States is impacted by high impact weather events.  These events range from hurricanes to tornadoes to winter storms. The National Weather Service (NWS) is tasked with forecasting and warning about these high impact events to save lives and protect property.  The process of alerting and mitigating these high impact events involves the close collaboration of partners in the broadcast media who are federally mandated to relay weather alerts to the public, and emergency management who organize and respond to weather threats. Historically, these groups have operated on islands during weather events with one way communication systems providing data.

Starting in 2000, some parts of the country started experimenting with Instant Messaging technologies to bridge these islands during high impact weather.  At the time, these involved the use of proprietary protocols and clients in an ad-hoc manner.  In 2005, a group of interested parties in Iowa started looking for a scalable, secure, and open source / standards system that could provide the level of flexibility necessary to support the real time collaboration of broadcast media, the NWS, and emergency management. This effort was called IEMChat.

After a perusal of IM technologies, IEMChat implemented XMPP and choose the Openfire server to power the project.  Openfire's ease of installation, functional administrative console, stability, and active support community has provided the foundation for the IEMChat project to flourish.  In a short 2 years, IEMChat's use has spread to over half of the country with 85+ NWS offices, 450+ broadcast media outlets, and hundreds of local emergency managers participating.  IEMChat has been put to use in recent high impact weather events such as the Super Tuesday tornado outbreak that ravaged the states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and other states.

Daryl Herzmann, IEMChat's primary developer who is based at Iowa State University,  says that Openfire has made the project possible. “Openfire provides us a robust and stable XMPP feature set supported by a fantastic community on Igniterealtime.org.  The developers' active support on the web forums and weekly chat has been outstanding and shown their commitment to improve Openfire to meet the needs of the community.”

A huge thank you to Daryl for all of his contributions to the Ignite Realtime community and for providing us with details about this great Openfire success story!

We are pleased to announce the availability of Openfire 3.5.0 RC1 off of the beta downloads page, along with Openfire Enterprise 3.5.0 RC1 off of the beta plugins page.  The official release is slated for late March or early April, depending on when the official release date of Clearspace 2.0 is.  There are a number of new features and bug fixes in this release.  A couple of the highlights are as follows:

New Security Features

3.5.0 includes two new improvements to the overall security of Openfire.  One is a new lock out manager, which allows administrators to lock out (disable) accounts, thereby preventing them from logging in.  This can be for a period of time, or "forever".  Another new security feature is a new auditor for actions performed in the admin console.  This will allow you to keep track of what has changed in your server's configuration, and who performed the change.

For more information, see: Big Brother In 3.5.0

Invisibility

3.5.0 includes the ability to connect without sending an available presence.  This provides an easy means for being "invisible" to other XMPP users, and visible specifically to those you intend on speaking to.  This support needs to be built into clients or programs that you might be using to be of direct use, but the capabilities are now available!

For more information, see: Playing Casper in 3.5.0

Clearspace Integration Improvements

Clearspace 2.0 and Openfire 3.5.0 can now work together harmoniously to share users, groups, vcards, presence, and various other functionality.  Not only that, but Clearspace and Openfire will configure their integration in a semi-automatic mode, where you provide a minimal configuration of Openfire and Clearspace and they take care of the rest!  You will see a new option during initial setup where you can choose Clearspace integration that will lead you through the steps.  Please note that Clearspace 2.0 or higher is required for this integration to function properly!

For more information, see: Clearspace 2.0 Public Beta

Performance Improvements

A number of improvements have been made to the overall performance of Openfire in 3.5.0.  An important index was added to one of the database tables that improves roster loading speed by a large degree. The networking framework used for external component connections has also been replaced with MINA, drastically improving the performance of external component connections.

Fixed Double-Byte Character Problems

3.5.0 includes fixes for double-byte characters not being handled correctly.  This should solve a number of problems with messages that include chinese characters, or other double-byte character encodings.

SparkWeb Enhancements

SparkWeb 3.5.0 includes a number of reliability improvements, especially with http binding, and also improved support for MUC functionality, such as moderation controls (kick/ban/etc).

New Admin Console Look and Feel

3.5.0 sports a brand new look and feel for it's administrative console.  Those who have used Clearspace before will be familiar with it, as it's mirrored in concept and general look after Clearspace's administrative console.  The new menu layout is much less cluttered than before, and should involve a lot less scrolling down the page to find what you want.  Warning: Due to changes in the CSS files, and browsers wanting to hold onto CSS files for dear life in their caches, you will likely need to hit shift-reload on your browser when visiting the new admin console.

And more!

You can view the full changelog here.

You can view the updated documentation (javadocs et al) here.

Plugin updates required for Openfire 3.5.0 are available on the betaplugins page.

The specific plugins that need to be updated are:

• IM Gateway

• User Search

• Enterprise

• MOTD

• SIP

Happy testing and please let us know of any issues you run into by posting in the  Openfire support forum!

Thanks!

-The Openfire Team