Customer Reviews

Openfire Administration: A practical step-by-step guide to rolling out a secure Instant Messaging service over your network

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Much of this documentation is also available online. The text in the book consists of a significant amount of screenshots and 99% of the instructions are how to click around the GUI. The chapter on clustering is 100% irrelevant, as the current version of openfire has no clustering plugin. The chapter on the connection manager leaves out a key piece of information: where do you get the connection manager code?

I did like the clairty of the documentation. It's well written and openfire is a great project, though the facts do not match up with the current release, only two months after the publication date.

Openfire Administration, written by Mayank Sharma, is a very easy-to-read and approachable book about the installation and administration of Openfire. While the developers of Openfire have done an excellent job of making the various features of the Openfire interface as easy-to-use as possible, the book assists in explaining what all the various features mean and how they can best be implemented. The book also benefits from the meticulous work put into the Openfire interface by including a large number of screen shots to help show, in detail, many of the features that are discussed.

Openfire Administration is broken out into eleven chapters, with sample topics spanning: what instant messaging is and how an organization can benefit from it; the actual installation and configuration Openfire; how to administer Openfire; managing and organizing users; connecting Openfire to a directory service, such as Active Directory and OpenLDAP; connecting to external instant messaging networks, such as Yahoo!, MSN and AOL; arching conversations; scaling Openfire; and using various plugins, including how to setup an online help desk.

In addition to the aforementioned topics, Openfire Administration also contains three appendixes: 1) for Spark, "the official Openfire client"; 2) for using Openfire's multi-user chat options; and 3) for preparing for the actual deployment of an instant messaging server in an organization.

While Openfire Administration falls into the technical category of books, and is very much geared towards System Administrators, there are sections that non-technical, end users would find very useful, as well. Chapter 2 and Appendix B both examine the basics (and beyond) of how to use Spark client; while Chapter 1 and Appendix C ask a lot of questions, such as, "Who should be allowed to use the organizations instant messaging system?", "What sort of security and oversight is needed?" and "What should be addressed before the actual deployment or use of any instant messaging system?"

Openfire Administration is a very informative book that provides not only the technical aspects of installing and managing Openfire but also some of the larger issues that come with deploying an instant messaging solution within an organization. Organizations looking to deploy Openfire would be well served by having a copy of Openfire Administration on their technical bookshelf

Openfire Administration is a fairly light-hearted tour of setup, features, and extensions for Openfire, an open source XMPP server. It walks you through initial setup on a number of operating systems, takes you through a number of scenarios that an administrator may face, and shows off a few of the extra addons that you may want to take advantage of. There are a wealth of screenshots to help you find your way while working through the administration interface. For most administrators, this book should be able to take you from little knowledge of Openfire to an up and running system in no time flat! I highly recommend this book to:
- anyone who either doesn't know anything about XMPP servers and wants to set up a corporate or public chat service
- anyone who is struggling with Openfire's setup
- even folk who have been using Openfire for a while and want to learn some new things

I've been using Openfire for a number of years now, and have even assisted in the development of it, and I learned a few things that I didn't know anything about before. ;)

Some things this book is -not- going to do for you:
- teach you how to write Openfire plugins
- walk you through how to set up single sign-on authentication
- help you debug issues you may be running into due to the operating system Openfire is running under, or the JVM itself

That said, those would probably be best left for an "advanced" version.

Not only is this book out of date and most of the information available online, but for the more complex topics (i.e. federation), this book tells you nothing, instead referring the reader to the website. I've been travelling and setting up Openfire servers for a DoD customer in areas where access to the Internet was limited, which is why I bought this book. Not only was the book a waste of money, it was a waste of weight in my baggage.

Ashame, too. A good Openfire book is desperately needed. Much of the information online is out of date as well!