Brand your Spark Installation

This how-to explains how to brand your installation of Spark IM client with your company name and logo along with some other bits and bobs

Install Spark

Make sure that the latest version of Spark is installed on either a test machine or a single client machine that you will use to modify the install.

Find the file to edit

The next step is to find the file that you need to edit to brand spark. The following steps assume that you have installed Spark in the default directory...

Navigate to C:\Program Files\Spark\lib

Find the file 'spark.jar' and open it with WinRar (other archivers will work but WinRar tends to give best results)

NOTE: Open the .jar file, do NOT extract it.

Navigate the .jar file

Inside the .jar archive, navigate to...

\org\jivesoftware\resource

Locate the file named 'default.properties' and double click to open with Notepad / Wordpad.

NOTE: Don't click 'View File' as this will not let you edit.

Edit the properties file

This file deals with the branding and main settings for your window behaviour in Spark.

The file is already very well commented, but if you're wanting to brand Spark, pay attention to the settings marked in red on the attachment.

Note: If you are changing the image, make sure to copy it into the images folder in the root of spark.jar

Once you have made the changes that you want, Save the text file and close it.

WinRar will then tell you that the file has changed and ask you if you want to add it back into the archive. Hit YES to update your changes.

Once the archive has been updated, start Spark and your changes will be displayed

Deploy your branded Spark

Once you're happy with the branding, all you need to do is copy your modified .jar file to all of your spark clients. This can be done with the xcopy command or in many other ways (see loads of other How-to's)

Note: If users update their spark clients, then spark.jar file might be overwritten. To avoid this, there is a settings in the properties file that allows you to disable updating. This ensures that your branding stays intact.

If you want to update Spark, you can push the update out from the Open Fire server, then copy the spark.jar file back again.

Conclusion

I'm sure that there are other ways to do this, but this was the easiest way that I found for a reasonably small deployment (about 20 users)

For some reason when it asks me if I want to update the file in the spark.jar archive it gives me a message saying the archive is either corrupted or an access denied error.

Go to Program Files\Spark and right clicked on the permissions and unchecked Read Only. I then copied the spark.jar file to my desktop, added the image and made the changes then copied the spark.jar file I had on my desktop to the C:\Program Files\Spark\lib\spark.jar file and replaced it. Worked!