The Spark Skinning Service has been a hot topic here at Jive for the past couple of weeks. The service is not yet ready to serve up customized builds of Spark 2.5 (it will be ready late May) and it turns out that one small change to the service will make it much easier to keep the Skinning Service up to date with the latest Spark release. What's the change? Removing the ability to change the color of Spark. So in the interest of staying in sync with Spark releases, we'll be removing this functionality.
We have also decided to stop selling Spark Skinning as a stand-alone service. Instead, it will only be available as part of Openfire Enterprise Edition. Current customers of Spark Skinning will not be affected. If you have a subscription to the service already it will continue to work until the current subscription runs out, and there is an upgrade path to Openfire Enterprise to keep the functionality after that time.
Spark Skinning is being phased out as a stand-alone service for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the changes to Openfire Enterprise pricing substantially lower the barrier for small deployments while maintaining value-based prices for larger deployments. The second reason is that the amount of administration required to keep two sets of Spark Skinning accounts functioning smoothly became too onerous. Simplifying to a single account type will help considerably.
As always, let me know if you have any thoughts about Spark Skinning or these changes.
greg
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- Name: Greg Unrein
- Email: greg@jivesoftware.com
- Member Since: Jul 20, 2004
- Last Logged In: Nov 29, 2007 11:37 AM
- Status Level:
Jiver (140 points)
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There have been a lot of questions about Asterisk-IM since the new voice features were added to Spark and Openfire. I'm happy to report that there are now four interested developers who are going to be stabilizing Asterisk-IM, adding new features and making sure those features work well with the other voice-related functionality in Spark and Openfire. There is plenty to do at the moment, but I wanted to find out what everyone wants to see from the plugin.
What would you like to see from the Asterisk-IM plugin once the existing features have been stabilized?
We're excited to be participating again this year as one of the mentor organizations under the XSF for Google's Summer of Code 2007. We have several project ideas and mentors ready to offer advice on getting the projects done. The ideas we've created:
Asterisk-IM: Asterisk and Openfire Integration XEP-0174) support
If you are interested in one of these projects or in proposing your own, we suggest sending an email to "greg at jivesoftware.com". The more we can get to know about you and your expertise before the official application process through Google's site, the more that will help during the selection process.
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