My only fear is that openfire will now achieve the same status as spark when it comes to upgrades..... virtually non-existant. I have said this with a joking tone in the past but now I am much more concerned, that your focus will shift further away from maintaining and improving spark, and openfire. Since they are not paid products what real incentive is there. Although I love your products, I have been very discouraged by the fact that Spark has been in limbo since summer 2007 and now the same could happen to the server.
I would like to point out that one difference here is... with Spark we lost the entire lead developer -and- are investigating an alternative. Whereas Openfire has the same people and same need. =)
Hey Todd,
Let me put it this way. Communication is required for good collaboration. Openfire will always be aligned with our real time collaboration solutions in Clearspace. That means that Openfire is here to stay.
In the particular case of Spark the problem was that Spark's architectire was not going to meet our needs. We wanted to have the same solution for desktop as for web pages. Moreover, we were looking also for good audio and video solutions and Java was not the best for that. The good news is that SparkWeb it is now open sourced and officially the replacement of Spark.
Regards,
-- Gato
Great news. Is the enterprise plugin available for free yet? Will the base openfire verion increase in revision to include this plugin?
Now this comment makes me even more concerned. We use Spark because it does SSO as well as the other features (screengrab, file transfer, etc). This was the major selling point of the Openfire/Spark platform in this company. A web solution is not ideal by ant stretch. It has a place for the road warrior in the company, but in general we rely in the ease of spark and its integration into our windows active directory domain. The abondoning of this client/server/domain relationship will not bode well with the powers that be.
Hey Todd,
Spark is not being removed from the list of products offered by igniterealtime.org. Many months ago we mentioned that our focus was SparkWeb and Spark was in maintenance mode. Those facts did not change. My intention was to say that SparkWeb is the client that we are now pushing and since it is open source then we can consider it the replacement of Spark.
Hope that helps to remove your concerns. !http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/images/emoticons/happy.gif|alt=:)|class=jive-emoticon|src=http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/images/emoticons/happy.gif|border=0!
Regards,
-- Gato
PS: We will be adding SSO and file transfer to SparkWeb too.
I agree. But some things are better left unsaid to upper management.
Hello Gato!
What will happen to the Spark Skinning Feature? It was free or almost free some time ago and then available to Enterprise users only. When you now open the Enterprise version to open source, will the skinning server stay online. I think we really want to know what your plans are on the desktop. Web is nice, Web2.0 is even nicer but imho nothing beats a real app running on my local machine. Is there any chance of getting an *.exe wrap around the Sparkweb_flash_applet???
Bye
Starry
While I haven't done anything serious with it yet, I had a quick proof of concept SparkAir running a couple of months ago. Basically it takes SparkWeb's base code and brings it to the desktop. A number of things have been done to the SparkWeb source code since then to make this even more of a possibility. Interestingly enough, the Air architecture seems to provide easier and in some cases better integration with the desktop than the Java APIs would. I am hoping to have some time to play with this more in the near future and get something whipped up for folk to play with/try out sometime soonish. But I can say I was very impressed and in fact surprised at how well it ended up working. I no longer feel like we can't do with SparkAir what we could do with SparkJava.
What portions of Openfire Enterprise will be included in the open source distribution? Will Fastpath be included?
Is this already available? I look forward to trying out the web client and fastpath. I share the concerns/frustrations of mtstravel. It seems that the spark client is very lacking for enterprise clients. Maybe the web client will solve my deployment problems, but man, a spark lite client with only absolutely necessary functionality, with a group policy deployable msi out of the box would be fantastic. When will the enterprise plugin be available?
Hey guys,
As we speak we are finishing another blog post that will explain how things will be available and when they are going to be available. In about one hour we will post this info.
Thanks,
-- Gato
Daniel, David, and Gato, you've mentioned that SparkAIR won't be able to do Fastpath. Fastpath is one of the main reasons we went with Openfire/Spark for Enterprise IM, and has gotten us a lot of kudos. What's going to happen to Fastpath?
I'm in the same boat as RobAlexander. I bought Openfire Enterprise IM for Fastpath. Since implementation in my company at the beginning of the year, it has increased my company's sales margins and is well liked. What is to become of Fastpath as well as support for it?
mtstravel:
Getting SSO working via web browser is a challenge, but is very possible. In fact, programming the client side is easier since the browsers already have some support for it. The big trick will be on the server side. I have already started experimenting with PKI-based SSO with sparkweb and Openfire, and I think I can make that happen fairly quickly. Kerberos based SSO may be a little more tricky. Ive done kerberos auth on Linux with Firefox, and I know IE has the ability as well, but that was working with Apache where most of the functionality is already done. Openfire will take a little work get that going for SparkWeb. Its certainly not impossible, though.
But in the end, Im with you. Spark needs an overhaul, and a web-based solution will not be able to 100% replace a desktop app.
I agree...a spark 2.6 or 3.0 would be welcomed. I've posted some of our issues before with spark and it just seems like we have to find workarounds. More and more it is looking like we'll have to have a custom built client made for us. a spark-lite client if you will...Maybe the client control plugin will help. but there are just too many funny quirks with spark.
Lack of Fastpath support in SparkWeb is a major limitation of official "replacement of Spark".
Does this portend an ever increasing dependence upon the commercial Clearspace product?
Dependence? No. Improved integration with? Yes. =)
Openfire needs to be able to stand alone while putting a big hug around Clearspace if you want it to. =)
Adding on to Daniel's comment -- Openfire will never depend on Clearspace, as that would simply be silly for an Open Source project. Our hope is that Openfire is so easy to setup and use and so valuable that just about everyone will want to have it.
If it's then super easy to also use Clearspace with Openfire (per choice), that seems like a good and reasonable thing.
is there any way to get an evaluation license now so one can test compatibly and need for these features before it is released? I cannot seem to install it without the license and the license link seams to be dead.
RobAlexander and comador,
We'll continue to support Fastpath via our commercial support organization, but that really only means critical bug fixes and not new features. Our hope is that Fastpath can thrive as an Open Source project, which will mean new features and energy. We'd love to see Fastpath supported in Sparkweb, but we won't have time to implement that ourselves in the near future.
Regards,
Matt
Matt,
I'd like to show you how we're using Fastpath in our Clearspace communities. Please private message me if you're interested in a demo. I think it would be very beneficial for Jive to invest resources into supporting Fastpath in SparkWeb and/or SparkAIR and/or integrating Fastpath into Clearspace.
Thanks,
Rob
thank you form Kings Instant Messenger for making enterprise server free as I am a small public server but would like to offer the sparkweb on my messenger
thank you admin K.I.M CHAT
Give me license file for Enterprise edition in openfire..........tell me how use this enterprise license file in openfire.......!
YEAH!!!! Thank you so much for this! Can´t wait to test the first OpenSource-release!
so is free enterprise product available now? if yes then where can I download it from?
Thanks
The original enterprise plugin has been divided into several opensource plugins. Clustering is not available as an opensource product as it is based on licensed code.
Thanks, this is really a great step for the community!