I used Spark as the IM for the last company I worked for. I was not in IT, so all I had was the Spark Client to deal with.
I want to set up an IM system for our office, about 5 people. I am in a satellite office, and IM would help when a phone call comes in, when the coffee is ready and such. We operate out of our own home offices occasionally and this would be a benefit versus texting messages as we have been doing... Also, if we wanted the system to be accessible when we work out of our home offices, we'd need it to be internet accessible too, not just the LAN.
I gather that OpenFire needs to be the server and Spark is the client (something transparent to me at the last job...). Therefore, OpenFire needs to be housed on a server, preferably one that is always on. So... Our office manager does not turn her computer off ever, but she does log out of her user account at night.
Could Openfire run on another user account on her Windows box to act as the server for this system, or would I need to get another computer to run the server full time? Since we will have a limited small user base, I am not sure what the demands would be.
I saw a site in a google search that used a Raspberry Pi for a server... Would this actually work for what I want to do?
Since I will be setting up from scratch, I am looking for a link to info or advice for this situation. If it's posted somewhere and I missed it before posting this, my apologies...
Mark