Openfire has been selected as one of the Software Components for WikiSuite. Here are the general component criteria.
Why Openfire instead of the many options in this space? To properly explain this one, it's important to first distinguish the various "real time" use cases. All use cases need chat, most need audio and screensharing. However, there are some "key distinctive features" which make some tools great at one use case, but poor for another. Some solutions have variations. For example, Adobe has Adobe Connect Meetings, Adobe Connect Learning, Adobe Connect Webinars.
| Type | Predominant mode | Key distinctive features | Typical app |
| Ongoing Team collaboration on projects | 1 to 1, many to many or emergent | Presence, and can escalate to audio / video / screensharing as needed | Skype |
| Meetings / conference calls | Many to many | Meeting notes (meeting agenda, and live collaborative note taking for decisions) | Etherpad + phone call, or Skype |
| Webinars / Scheduled Course | 1 to many | Presentation and whiteboard | BigBlueButton |
| Community presence and support | many to many | web interface and desktop/mobile clients | IRC |
| Help desk for team members | 1 to 1, but can be transferred | Share screen and remote control. Easier to install software on their computer. | TeamViewer |
| Help desk for customers | 1 to 1, but can be transferred | To route request to someone who is available. Canned responses. Difficult to install software on their computer. | Openfire Fastpath |
| Remote Management | 1 to no one or 1 to 1 | Remote login and management, even unattended | VNC / Guacamole |
We picked Openfire for the following reasons:
We ultimately want WikiSuite to be awesome at covering all the use cases above, and we do so by mostly combining Openfire, with Jitsi Meet and Converse.js (which has both a pop up chat and a full page interface)
https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview.html
https://xmpp.org/about/myths.html
While Openfire Meetings and BigBlueButton broadly share the same feature set (videoconferencing, screensharing, etc), there are fundamental difference.
BigBlueButton is a distance education tool.
https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad
Apache OpenMeetings is an interesting option with a diversity of paid support options and quite a few features, however, the focus is more about scheduled meetings or classes than ongoing collaboration. For example, XMPP is not supported.
No XMPP
Hubl.in as part of http://open-paas.org/ is a newer option. Social networking + videoconferencing + realtime collaborative editor + others.
XMPP support?
Tox is interesting
Retroshare is very interesting
Not based on XMPP
Lots of chat features but what about videoconference?
Tigase is an XMPP server and it could have been the base
ejabberd is an XMPP server and it could have been the base
ejabberd is written in Erlang (not a deal breaker, but less known than Java)
https://github.com/processone/ejabberd
Prosody is written in Lua (not a deal breaker, but less known than Java)
Prosody is lacking a web admin panel
There is no WebRTC support or plugin
http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/
CandyJS is interesting. And we experimented with it and contributed the conversion to Bootstrap for responsive design.
But: