03 Nov, 2009
Chatting in SharePoint
Posted by: Kat In: SharePoint
As part of my project responsibilities, I’m tasked with looking for additional features to add to SharePoint to make it more of a community website. Now if you’ve used SharePoint, you’ll know that it has some great collaboration features, but it’s still not quite there when it comes to full communications. For example, it has no chat feature. It also has no way for people to instant message one another. MySites definitely give the “useful” user profile tool – but that’s not much to shake a stick at when it comes to communications. If you think about sites like Facebook – they have great communication features. Think about ways to share bookmarks, message online friends, add friends, blacklist friends, create groups, blog, post on forums, etc. Some of these features exist in SharePoint but not in such a clean way.
The first feature that I went looking for was a live chat for SharePoint. I came across a free web part called the chatterbox.
http://cks.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5021
Some additional reading on it : http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/05/15/chatterbox-persistent-chat-session-for-sharepoint.aspx
This has already been deployed on our team sites – but we’re not sure if we like it yet. I was hoping that it would be a plug and play web part that you could simply add to the gallery and users could use – but it requires some configuration in order to make it work. However, we’re still refining a process for rolling it out – and as soon as we have a plan - I’ll definitely post something about how it has worked for us.