Rocket.chat is an opensource Department hosted team chat application that allows instructors or researchers to host chat development teams within the Department without requiring students and faculty to obtain accounts with external cloud providers.
Course Related Chat Teams
Course related Rocket.chat teams can be provisioned automatically for instructors teaching Computer Science courses. Intructors are enrolled as chat team owners, channel members can be automatically provisioned from course enrollment data.
Additional Rocketchat information for Instructors
Research and Administrative Team Chat
Researchers and Department groups wanting to use team chat services should contact itsupport@csc.uvic.ca.
We hope to be able to automate creating accounts with channel admin privileges shortly, but for now chat accounts can be manually assigned privilges to be able to create teams and team owners are able to invite external collaborators, students and employees to join their chat channels.