Lync Alternative
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@tonyshowoff said:
@scottalanmiller The Spark Client, a hung of dog crap, doesn't do that or much of anything, but the great news is one can use any Jabber client out there. We mostly use Pidgin 'round here.
Which is sad. because it's the most controllable from open fire. Not sure why they don't replace it with a native app.
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@badjesus said:
We have an existing XMPP server that we can use (through smartermail) so it is mostly just the client that we need. A clients with a good user friendly UI that will show as away when screen is locked.
Ah, well you can use any. It's the client that would do the triggering. Pigeon is what we tended to use towards the end.
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Open Fire is fairly easy to setup, though things like LDAP and MySQL can be confusing for novices to that kind of thing, since in general Java makes dealing with those things about as easy as walking on a bunch of marbles. I do like its ability to force users to have the same contact list and so on, though.
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The contact list enforcement is awesome. We used that extensively.
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Long ago NTG did hosted OpenFire for clients. It was pretty cool.
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We use Cisco Jabber. It's ok and has the the lock (away) feature that you are looking for. It also integrates with AD. It's Cisco so it has more management than the average business IM platform.
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@IRJ said:
We use Cisco Jabber. It's ok and has the the lock (away) feature that you are looking for. It also integrates with AD. It's Cisco so it has more management than the average business IM platform.
And much more expensive too. I can't stand that Cisco hijacked the term Jabber and put it on a product that competes with real Jabber/XMPP. Very poor taste.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
We use Cisco Jabber. It's ok and has the the lock (away) feature that you are looking for. It also integrates with AD. It's Cisco so it has more management than the average business IM platform.
And much more expensive too. I can't stand that Cisco hijacked the term Jabber and put it on a product that competes with real Jabber/XMPP. Very poor taste.
It was free in our situation. I am not sure how or why, but that is the whole reason we went with it. We buy in on alot of Cisco hardware, phones, and services so it may have been included with something else.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Sparkum said:
Sorry guys,
My bad, actually looking for the client side software.
Spark is the client for Openfire. Though it's quite dated.
Or Pidgin.
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Jabber is not very good. We have it here and I don't like it.
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I connect to our Jabber server using Pidgin because Pidgin is superior!
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@thanksajdotcom said:
Jabber is not very good. We have it here and I don't like it.
Real Jabber or Cisco Jabber?
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@thanksajdotcom said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Sparkum said:
Sorry guys,
My bad, actually looking for the client side software.
Spark is the client for Openfire. Though it's quite dated.
Or Pidgin.
Without modification clients like that are generally a no-no in a corporate environment. It allows the users to add any accounts.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Without modification clients like that are generally a no-no in a corporate environment. It allows the users to add any accounts.
If you want services blocked, block the service. Using a client to block the service isn't very effective, they can just use a web client to get around that. And I've done that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Without modification clients like that are generally a no-no in a corporate environment. It allows the users to add any accounts.
If you want services blocked, block the service. Using a client to block the service isn't very effective, they can just use a web client to get around that. And I've done that.
True but not all have web clients, and content filter's db of services aren't always up to date.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksajdotcom said:
Jabber is not very good. We have it here and I don't like it.
Real Jabber or Cisco Jabber?
That and I'm also curious as to why it's not very good, are we talking about client, server, the XMPP protocol, what?
The protocol is verbose as hell, but that's XML for you, and at one point AOL was even toying with the idea of switching to XMPP for AIM, but that was a long time ago. In general though it is cleverly designed, but implementations are all over the place, I still have the XMPP gateway to OSCAR I wrote like 14 years ago, it was deployed only briefly and was mostly abused by teenagers with too much stolen VB6 code and time on their hands.
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@thanksajdotcom said:
Jabber is not very good. We have it here and I don't like it.
Huh? almost all unified communications is based of of Jabber/XMPP and SIP.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@thanksajdotcom said:
Jabber is not very good. We have it here and I don't like it.
Huh? almost all unified communications is based of of Jabber/XMPP and SIP.
I think he means Cisco Jabber, not Jabber/XMPP. But I'm not sure.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Without modification clients like that are generally a no-no in a corporate environment. It allows the users to add any accounts.
If you want services blocked, block the service. Using a client to block the service isn't very effective, they can just use a web client to get around that. And I've done that.
True but not all have web clients, and content filter's db of services aren't always up to date.
Basically all have web clients. Those that don't users can run non-installed clients to talk on. Basically, using a client of that nature just isn't security. Sure, it makes it less obvious to talk on other services, but it doesn't stop it in any way. If you want to stop it there are better ways. If you aren't going to stop it, might as well make it convenient.
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@scottalanmiller said:
If you aren't going to stop it, might as well make it convenient.
That's a bad practice.
