Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Frontier and Jabber

Author:Robert Cassidy
Posted:6/26/2000; 5:43:56 PM
Topic:Frontier and Jabber
Msg #:18128
Prev/Next:18127 / 18129

A ways back I asked about RT chat & Frontier. No repsonses. (It's rare when that happens so it's become very disappointing - a positive statement about this communities willingness to help)

Lo and behold, here's a link to Jabber and a sense that they and Userland (and others, but I'll focus on what I care about right now) might be approaching one another here. So still on my high over getting Carbonized Frontier, I guess it's roll-up-the-sleeves time for me to get this rolling unless someone has already started on it...

Here's my set-up (which can probably be repeated in so many words by others with customer service in their mission statement):

I run a university office and have 2000 very technically-saavy students to interact with. About 1/3 of this pool are very new, totally clueless (not stupid, just uninformed), spread out all over the country, and need far more service than we can provide face-to-face and one-to-one. Manila will help us distribute information to them, but a real-time group chat service would help immensely. They don't know what questions to ask, so you need to draw it out of them.

Specifically:

I'd like to be able to set up a chat at a prescribed time and have users (without downloading software) participate from a link on my website.

I'd like my staff to make themselves available for individual chat at given times. The reason for this is that most users can't talk on the phone and work on the web at the same time. I'd like to be able to work collaboratively with them on certain information and still be able to interact, and I can only see that happening with chat. Chat availability would need to be indicated on our website somehow.

I have no problem using a totally independent mechanism, but I haven't found one that doesn't require some other software, some prior agreement on chatting, platform issues, usability problems, blah blah blah. This needs to be as easy as getting a web page.

But it'd also be nice to suck in the whole transcript as XML and lay it out on the website so we don't need to artificially create every interesting conversation every day. Stuff like that - part of why I want the integration...

Soooo...

1) Does this integration make any sense at all?
2. If it does, where do people see it going? (particularly interested in hearing from Dave and Jeremie on this)
3. Do I need to do anything, or will it just happen on it's own? (lazy clause)
4. If it won't happen on it's own, what do I need to do and is anyone else interested in helping me?

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