Best Practices

Following are some best practices from this chapter:

• If there is any question as to whether multiple Persistent Chat servers will be needed, install the first server as a standalone instance. If the first Persistent Chat server is collocated with a Standard Edition Front End, no additional servers can be added to the pool.

• If ethical walls are required to prevent conflict of interest in the organization, configure Persistent Chat categories to meet these requirements, where the allowed members for each category are limited to specific groups of users.

• In smaller businesses or when no ethical walls are required, a single category can be used for all chat rooms. The allowed members of the category would include all users, and then membership lists can be used to grant or restrict access to the chat rooms.

• If a central support team such as the help desk will be used to create new rooms, assign the members of this team as creators on each category using a distribution group or an organizational unit containing all the members. This will make it easy to maintain the appropriate permissions when members of the team change.

• The category names are not visible to the end users; only the chat room names are. With that in mind, choose category names that are meaningful to the administrators, whereas the chat room names need to be meaningful to the users. A description can also be assigned to each chat room for further clarity if needed.

• Assign appropriate add-ins to chat rooms to enhance the overall Persistent Chat experience for end users. If the organization maintains websites that provide useful business data to specific teams, these can be assigned as approved add-ins by the administrator, which will allow chat room creators and managers to associate these with chat rooms under their control.

• If there is a requirement for an “announcement style” chat room that is read-only for the majority of users, create a chat room with auditorium as the type. Assign one or more users as presenters for the room so that these users can post announcements and other information to be read by the members.