Inner Sanctum Computing

Book Review - Openfire Administration

About the author:

Mayank Sharma
Mayank Sharma is a contributing editor at SourceForge, Inc's Linux.com. He also writes a monthly column for Packt Publishing. Mayank has contributed several technical articles to IBM developerWorks where he hosts a Linux Security blog. When not writing, he occasionally teaches courses on Open Source topics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, as an Industry Expert.

The Review:

While this guide is a fairly comprehensive tutorial on the setup and administration of Openfire chat server, it does have some glaring omissions and inaccuracies. The book covers the installation configuration and management of Openfire 3.5.2 for Linux and Windows. Right here is where one of the omissions comes into play, where is the information for Macintosh users? I realise this platform is not a major player in the server market but Openfire supports the platform so it should be covered. Additionally this version of Openfire, 3.5.0 actually, marked the end of the commercial licensing option. Openfire is now fully open source. The book states that commercial licenses are still an option, which is not the case. The other main flaw in this book is they lead first time installers of Openfire down the path of using the provided embedded database. This in my opinon is the wrong path to lead somebody. The embedded database is harder to manage and recover from failures. The book does mention the use of external databases later in the book, but it really should stress that this should be the preferred storage method.

Once you get beyond the basic setup and configuration chapters, which are very well written I may add, the book goes into how to use some advanced features, as well as extending Openfire with plugins. While I would not expect this book to cover all the plugins I did find it interesting that the author chose to cover the iBall community plugin instead of the Monitoring Service plugin from Jive. This may be attributed to a timing issue though. The open source plugins from Jive the were once part of the commercial package became available several weeks after the open source only version of openfire. That said the coverage of the iBall plugin is quite good.

The advanced features of Openfire covered in the book also seems a bit arbitrary. The author chose to cover Fastpath, a newly open sourced plugin, in detail. This again makes me question the iBall coverage. This is a great feature to cove and can be difficult for a novice. I would know as I have some guide doccuments posted on the community to aid in Fastpath deployment. Where the book falls short is with SSO and Kerberos integration. This is a highly discussed topic in the online community at igniterealtime.org. To glance over this topic was a disservice. This book starts with a discussion of IM in the corporate envirnment and why Openfire is an ideal solution. In my opinion SSO and Kerberos integration is key to that environment, as much as LDAP, archiving, gateways, Fastpath, or any of the other features discussed in the book.

I know this review sounds overly negative, but that is not my intention. I am in fact quite pleased with the book. It will prove to be an invaluable resource to those individuals just starting out with the product. The areas of detail covered in the book are very well covered, including excellent screen captures of important screens. To sum up, what is covered in this book is covered very well, with very few errors. These errors do not, in fact, detract from the value of this manual. This is because the errors I found seem only to be in the area of licensing. If you would like to read a sample chapter yourself click the image to the right. I would be remiss if I did not mention that the newest version of Openfire makes some aspects of this book obsolete.

Where to purchase:

This book is available directly from the publisher as a paperback or PDF ebook. The address for this is: http://www.packtpub.com/step-by-step-guide-to-openfire-administration/book. It can also be purchased at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Openfire-Administration-Mayank-Sharma/dp/1847195261/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225295992&sr=8-1