Good business practice needs good communications-new generation chat software for real-time discussion

Whilst the email and newsgroups have long been recognised as commercially useful tools, chatroom technology has generally been regarded as a somewhat frivolous application. Chatrooms however may serve a variety of useful commercial and educational as well as recreational purposes. Each context of use, however, has its own requirements. Consequently, there is a need for the design of generic software for chatroom generation which is readily configurable to the requirements of a context and which is also extensible. The design requirements of such a system are discussed and a novel generic system, ChatterBox, implemented in Java, is presented.