I am very happy that Berklee is tackling the chat solution!
Some comments from our evaluation experience:
1. The solution should run on a dedicated port AND through http-tunneling on port 80 (corporate firewalls)
2. The chat should be scopable: groups/private/public
3. The chat should be moderateable: A moderator/expert can accept/deny posts.
FOR THE FUTURE:
4. The chat could support voice, video capability
5. The chat could support whiteboard capability
6. The chat could support co-browsing
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It looks like Jabber could be the answer:
1. There is a JEP for http-tunneling (http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0025.html)
2. Jabber supports scoping
3. "The existing open-source conferencing implementation does not include this functionality. Dave Waite spent a bunch of time trying to come up with a new draft for conferencing protocol which included all of this type of functionality, but that effort has been pretty "stagnant" for a while. Lots of people are interested in having better/more-robust conferencing stuff, but no one has really stepped up to the plate and put together a JEP yet."
(http://mailman.jabber.org/pipermail/jdev/2002-April/011545.html)
4-6: We didn't really check on this yet, but you can check out http://www.groove.net to see this functionality at work...
