I've had my eye on possibly integrating meebo at some point, but my guess is someone could easily use it from within an html module using source view in the editor to put in any markuup or javascript needed. It might also require adding some javascript into layout.master. I really haven't read up on it yet but documentation is here. It looks easier than anything else I know of other than perhaps commercial products.

Also woopra is possibly worth looking at. Its primarily a traffic analytics tool but it has a click to chat feature as well. I've never used it, its free to sign up but then its a waiting list until the approve you. I signed up several weeks ago and still no approval for me. Probably their chat is more customer service oriented. For your scenario the meebo rooms seems like what you would want.

Best,

Joe

Thats pretty interesting. You may be able to get that to work by putting the dll in the /bin folder and creating a simple module and put the webchat control inside it. Probably would need to add this at the top

<%@ Register Assembly="ChatControl" Namespace="ChatControl" TagPrefix="cc1" %>

and then this in the body of the control

<cc1:WebChat ID="WebChat2" runat="server" CallBackInterval="4" ChatTopic="Cooking" HistoryCapacity="20" Height="245px" Width="490px" />

obviously with your own topic.

Probably would want something like this in page load:

if(Request.IsAuthenticated)
{
WebChat2.UserName = User.Identity.Name;
}
else
{
WebChat1.Visible = false;
}

The only thing I don't like about this control is it stores the messages in memory on the server via application variables. This means the chats are not persisted permanently anywhere and it may use more memory than I would like. Possibly at some point I can extend this to use a database.

Best,

Joe

Wonder what re-written means, did they just wrap it in a module or did they implement a database layer for it?

In any case it looks like a good start for a chat feature, thanks for sharing the link.

Best,

Joe