I am trying to figure this all out. I use Dreamhost for my web hosting needs and have my own jabber account on one of dreamhost’‘s servers, and I would love to be able to use Spark for that Jabber account as well as my regular Yahoo, Gmail and such right along side it. I keep reading about the use of Openfire with the correct gateways to do so. From what I am gathering is Openfire for installing on the web server and not the local machine, right? I accidentally downloaded and installed Openfire on my PowerMac OS X 10.4.10 (not a server) before I realized what it really was. Stupid right? Anyways, I would just like someone to explain exactly what Openfire is for (ie. it is just if you control your own web server for chatting, or can be used on your local machine to add functionality to your IM’‘ing experience and gateways, or … ?). Do I need Openfire to connect to the other IM’‘ing outfits? Can I install Openfire on a local machine, or is it not designed for it? Or, am I just really lost in this whole IM’'ing world? Please help!
Justin