Ramp Up #17: Host your own Instant Messaging System with Openfire
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Do employees in your company use instant messaging services like Yahoo, AIM, MSN or GTalk to conduct sensitive conversations? There are many reasons why you might want to run your own secure instant messaging server instead of relying upon these services:
- Security – For conversations between employees on the same network, instead of sending cleartext messages over the public internet they could be conducted end-to-end behind the firewall.
- Monitoring – You may have situations where you need monitoring and content filtering on IM conversations to enforce policies related to abusive language or sexual harassment.
- Search convenience – Your employees might benefit from a central, searchable index that serves a knowledgebase built from all past conversations.
- Audit trail – Your company’s data retention policy might require that you log every conversation in a secure place to retain records of what & when critical statements were made (eg. financial brokerages, military or government programs, etc.)
- Regulatory compliance – You might be obligated by HIPAA or SOX regulations to conduct sensitive communications exclusively through hardware and systems that you control.
These are just a few of the reasons why you might want to run your own instant messaging server rather than rely upon the free SaaS alternatives. The JumpBox for Openfire lets you do just that. As you’ll see in the video below we go from zero to live chat sessions in about three minutes. We’ll also show how to:
By the time you finish watching you’ll have everything you need to deploy your own on-premise IM system. Enjoy!
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