I'll keep publishing

Published by Packt Publishing, written by Mayank Sharma (ISBN 978-1-847195-26-5)

I’ve spent the last month or so reading this book and my summary is that it’s worth buying if you’re looking for an easy way to setup an enterprise, standards based IM (EIM) platform on your OS of choice. Openfire runs as a Java app in application servers such as Tomcat and has been around for a long enough to be stable and reliable, a good book along side it helps smooth out the learning curve.

The books title is slightly misleading in that your first impression might be that it’s about Openfire administration only. In fact it covers most of the ‘family’ of solutions around Openfire, like Spark, gateways to legacy IM (MSN, AOL etc), web chat and VoIP. There are even a sections on preparing for an EIM rollout, directory integration, multiple locations, clustering and archiving.

Each chapter is easy to understand and the chapters themselves follow a logical order with some good background information on Jabber (XMPP). Openfire’s open source community delivers most things you’ll need for an EIM solution and this book is a great way to kick off that process.