If chat vendor eShare Inc. has its way, isolated enterprise chat servers will soon be networked, enabling sales to talk to marketing to talk to engineering and so on.

The prospect of interconnecting formerly isolated chat servers is among the new features in eShare Expressions Interactions Suite 3.1, due at the end of the month. eShare calls the new feature Community Servers.

"If you are installing a lot of chat servers, at some point you'll want to connect them to create a sort of meta community," said Ron Dunaisky, eShare's senior vice president. "You can send instant messages to one another and teleport from a room on one server to a room on another."

Networked chat servers have obvious uses on the corporate intranet, but they also could be a boon on the public Web, where chat continues to emerge as an important feature on some sites.

Analysts are pointing to chat as a key element in commerce sites. Though "AOL-style" social chat continues to dominate, service-related chat supporting help desk and other E-commerce applications will help Web sites form the strongest virtual communities, said Jupiter Communications analyst Kate Doyle, who follows the chat market.

Also on tap for version 3.1 are new capabilities for moderating large online chat events. It supports multiple moderators and the ability to poll for questions on a virtual "row-by-row" basis, Dunaisky said.

eShare Expressions offers chat, guided tours, discussion groups, buddy-list messaging and more. The server runs on Windows NT, Sun Solaris and BSDI and supports multiple clients, including Java, ActiveX and HTML. The current version costs $3,995.

The suite has scored some major customers, including Lycos, Geocities and 1-800-Flowers on the public Internet, and counts MCI among its enterprise users.

Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc.