Group Chat Server Best Practices

Topic Last Modified: 2009-02-27

As you create your categories and chat rooms and assign scope and membership, the following tips may help your planning:

• If you want all categories and chat rooms to follow a global behavior, make that setting at the root category, before you create any subcategories, and have all subcategories and chat rooms inherit it.
• Avoid placing chat rooms in the root category, unless they are public announcement channels.
• In most cases, you should allow users to create new chat rooms, so that discussions about new topics can be started any time.
• If your company does not require the enforcement of an ethical wall, and you are not granting federated users access, do not narrow scope at all in your category tree; put all your users in the scope of the root category, and let that scope be inherited all the way down the tree. Then use only membership lists to grant or restrict access to each chat room.
• Give each chat room a complete name and topic summary that locates it fully within your organization. Because users cannot see the category name when they use the chat room, you cannot rely on the category name to help users determine what the chat room is intended to discuss.
• You may want to include “Public” or a similar word in the name of every chat room that is open to federated users, to remind your organization’s users that these chat rooms include members from outside the organization.