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It's not unusual for Web developers to want to enhance the appeal of their Web sites with chats and guest speakers. What follows is an easy, step-by-step guide to improving your Web site's communication features by installing a chat server and by hosting an event on your Web site based on Microsoft® FrontPage® technology. All you need is Microsoft FrontPage, shell access to your server, and some guidelines on how to moderate your guest speaker's chat event.

Setting up a chat server in FrontPage means writing a chat solution yourself or integrating third-party software. The chat solution described here is a typical Web environment example: a Microsoft Windows NT® Server operating system, an Internet Information Server (IIS), and a free chat server called okChat from jBochi International. Microsoft FrontPage development was done on a Microsoft Windows® 2000 machine.

The freeware chat server to be integrated will run on Windows and UNIX operating systems. OkChat for Windows requires Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, or Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and the Microsoft SDK for Java. Further details on system specifications can be found at the okChat specifications page. Instructions on installing Java files in your operating system environment are included with the JDK installation package you can download from Microsoft.