This is the second blog post about real time communication support in Clearspace that started with Connecting a chat client to Clearspace. Today we are going to cover chat events that are going to be available in Clearspace 2.1. Lets start giving some personal examples to illustrate real usages for chat events.

1. Every Wednesday at 10:00 AM PST developers of igniterealtime.org projects join the chat service to answer development questions. Members of the community can join the chat service using their XMPP client of choice or using the web client. Moreover, users of other XMPP servers can also join the chat service as long as server-to-server is enabled.

2. Every Monday morning developers of the Real Time Communication team, that includes local and remote developers, join a chat room to discuss status updates and goals for the week.

3. Last week I was invited to a meeting to discuss some technical problem about clustering.

In the above examples we see different usages for chat events. The first example is showing a repetitive chat event that is not associated to any space, project or social group but to the entire site. In the second example we have a project, but it could be a space or social group, whose members meet every week to discuss their work. As you would expect, permissions of the container are applied to determine who can join the group chat. And finally, we see that scheduled chats could be a one time only activity.

A chat transcript is created for each occurrence of the chat event. When the event is over the transcript is "closed" and moderators can moderate/edit it. As any content in Clearspace, transcripts are indexed on real time and can be searched just like you search for a document or a blog.

A persistent room in Openfire is created for each chat event. A new groupchat service was added to Openfire that interacts with Clearspace to control who can create, join, configure and delete rooms. As I said in my previous blog, it is possible to use your own XMPP client to join a chat event or you can just chat from the Clearspace site. File transfers in rooms was also added to Openfire but the Clearspace side is not ready yet so the feature will be ready for the next release of Clearspace. However, since you can use your own XMPP client it is still possible to make use of the new functionality to share files in a room. The file transfer feature is based on WebDAV File Transfers

Next week we will cover other type of conversations that are going to be part of Clearspace 2.1.