Openfire 3.5.1
Openfire (formerly Wildfire) is a real time collaboration (RTC) server dual-licensed under the Open Source GPL and commercially. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance.
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Openfire 3.5.1 Latest release: April 24, 2008
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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.
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)
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.
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.
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
If you install the Monitoring and/or Fastpath plugin, make absolute sure that you read the readme first! There are included instructions for how to migrate your database from the Enterprise plugin to the new plugin database tables. If you have ever run the Enterprise plugin or the old Fastpath plugin before it was integrated with Enterprise, make sure you don't forget this or you will be unhappy!
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.
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.
We're in the process of making the Openfire Enterprise module Open Source (see Matt's blog). The Enterprise module provided several areas of functionality that were available as a single plugin. A quick list:
Reporting - a dashboard with statistics about server load, user sessions, chats, groupchats, etc. and support for executing reports.
Chat archiving - support for tracking conversations taking place on the server. Both one-to-one and groupchat conversations can be archived.
SparkWeb client - the web-based version of the successful Spark client.
Clustering - support for running several machines hosting the same domain. Thus adding fail-over and better scalability of the server.
Client control - controls whether certain features are available or not in the Spark client (e.g. file transfer, broadcast, groupchat, etc.). Moreover, it is also possible to specify which clients can connect to the server, push new versions of the Spark client and populate rosters with groupchat bookmarks.
Fastpath - provides rich web-based click-to-chat functionality with support for requests to the best available operator in queues. It's ideal for web-based realtime helpdesks.
Turning a commercial product into an open source product implies more effort that one would initially estimate. Therefore, we are going to break this process in two stages. During the first stage we will offer several plugins that will include the features listed above (with the exception of clustering). Our clustering solution relies on a commercial product and will not be made Open Source. The output of the first phase will be:
The second stage of this process will include:
Stage one is planned for April 27th, 2008. That means that two weeks from now we will have most of the functionality included in the enterprise edition available as open source plugins. No clear date has been assigned to stage two but it should take place a few months after stage one.
Reporting - a dashboard with statistics about server load, user sessions, chats, groupchats, etc. and support for executing reports.
Chat archiving - support for tracking conversations taking place on the server. Both one-to-one and groupchat conversations can be archived.
SparkWeb client - the web-based version of the successful Spark client.
Clustering - support for running several machines hosting the same domain. Thus adding fail-over and better scalability of the server.
Client control - controls whether certain features are available or not in the Spark client (e.g. file transfer, broadcast, groupchat, etc.). Moreover, it is also possible to specify which clients can connect to the server, push new versions of the Spark client and populate rosters with groupchat bookmarks.
Fastpath - provides rich web-based click-to-chat functionality with support for requests to the best available operator in queues. It's ideal for web-based realtime helpdesks.
Turning a commercial product into an open source product implies more effort that one would initially estimate. Therefore, we are going to break this process in two stages. During the first stage we will offer several plugins that will include the features listed above (with the exception of clustering). Our clustering solution relies on a commercial product and will not be made Open Source. The output of the first phase will be:
- Reporting and Chat transcripts plugin - this plugin will include the reporting and chat transcript functionalities
- SparkWeb - SparkWeb will be available as a separate project and not as an Openfire plugin
- Client Control plugin - the ability to manage clients will be available as an Openfire plugin
- Fastpath plugin - the Fastpath application will be composed of an Openfire plugin and the WebChat plugin. The webchat.war plugin can be deployed to Openfire as a plugin or can be deployed to your application server (e.g. Tomcat) of choice.
The second stage of this process will include:
- Reporting and chat archiving - This functionality was available as a plugin in stage one. For stage two we will evaluate making it part of the server itself.
Stage one is planned for April 27th, 2008. That means that two weeks from now we will have most of the functionality included in the enterprise edition available as open source plugins. No clear date has been assigned to stage two but it should take place a few months after stage one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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gato Found in the forests of Argentina chewing on his own leg and reading a book on concurrent programming. |
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