From the user's point of view, one of the most important aspects of using an in-house Instant Messaging server is to have secured many-to-many discussions. In IM-speak, this text-version of a teleconference is known as a group chat. Not only does Openfire allow group chats, but it also offers comprehensive controls that make it malleable enough to host on-demand, secure, private group chats between senior management as well as always-on, casual, hang-out group chats for impromptu meetings around the virtual water cooler for all employees.
Group chats are isolated in virtual chat rooms. In this Appendix, we'll look at the various group chat configuration options at our disposal, while creating a couple of rooms.
We'll start by looking at the group chat settings that are applicable to all groups. As an admin, you'll have to pay special attention to these settings as they'll apply to all group chat rooms. To set or modify any of the global settings, head over to Group Chat | Group Chat Settings.
Name of the service: As you already know, Openfire offers its "features" as services. We've already discussed some of them, such as the broadcast service. First and foremost, you'll have to select a name for the group chat service. By default, Openfire uses conference as the name.
History Settings: Remember the Recent History feature of the Spark client we covered in Appendix A? In quite the same fashion, Openfire displays the last few lines of an ongoing conversation in a room to new users, when they join in. As the administrator, it's up to you to decide on the number of messages that should be displayed.
You can choose between three history display options to:
Show the entire history
Show a specific number of messages (the default is 25)
Don't display old messages at all
Global Administrators: You can specify a list of users with special powers. These global administrators will be able to join any room, and Openfire will give them the same powers as those of the room owner. The users added here should be selected very judiciously as they'll also be allowed to enter private and confidential rooms. Depending on the situation, it might be best to avoid adding any users to the list of global administrators.
Room Creation Permissions: By default, all users have the power to create rooms. Some organizations might prefer to keep this default setting. But you can also choose to restrict the ability to create rooms to a list of specific users. Limiting this ability to team leaders or department heads is a good idea.
Handling Idle users: Openfire, by default, will allow users to linger in a room for as long as they wish. You should go with this setting if you plan to have lounge-type rooms, or rooms that act as virtual bulletin boards. If on the other hand, you have a lot of rooms that limit the number of members (how to do this is covered in the next section), you might choose to kick out users after they've been idle for a particular period of time, say 30 minutes.
Conversation Logging: You can choose to log the conversation of a particular room when creating the room—we'll cover how to do this in the next section. In the global settings, you just have to select a flush interval (in seconds), and batch size (the number of messages), based on which conversations are logged. It's alright to go with the default settings, unless you've tweaked some other Openfire parameters, say cache size, and so on.
Although for most cases it's quite alright to leave these settings with their default values, you might need to alter them—especially the room creation permission settings and history settings. As with all admin settings, you are treading dangerous waters here, when you take into account settings such as the global room administrators. Make this decision with due diligence.