Book Image

Openfire Administration

By : Mayank Sharma
Book Image

Openfire Administration

By: Mayank Sharma

Overview of this book

<p>Openfire is a free, open-source and full featured Jabber-based Instant Messaging server.<br /><br />This book is a guide to setting up Openfire, tweaking it, and customizing it to build a secure and feature-rich alternative to consumer IM networks. The features covered include details about setting up the server, adding and handling users and groups, updating, and extending the service with plug-ins, connecting with users on external IM networks, connecting with external voice over IP solutions and more, with user-friendly instructions and examples so that you can easily set up your IM network.<br /><br />The book deals with several features of Openfire to streamline communication within an enterprise and beyond. It shows how to configure Openfire to allow only secured connections. It then explains how Openfire complements other existing services running on your network. Managing and fostering IM as a real-time collaboration and communication tool is what this book is about.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Openfire Administration
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Extending with Plugins


There's one thing I want in any server software I use—plugins. Thankfully some of the best ones I use, such as Apache, MySQL, Perl, etc., are all pluggable in their own way. Needless to say, Openfire, too, is pluggable. Because there's (yes, here I go again) hardly anything to installing plugins in Openfire, I'll show you one plugin all admins should use in this section. There are other powerful plugins as well that we'll cover in later chapters.

Installing a plugin is simple. Notice the set of tabs at the top of the Openfire administration console? There's one called Plugins. The page this tab takes you to lists all of the installed plugins. As we haven't installed any yet, there will be none listed. From the navigation menu on this page, click on Available Plugins. This section has several plugins, several open source ones, and a couple of commercial ones. Every plugin has a brief Description (refer to the following screenshot), a Version number, the name of its...