In my experience, online chat always has trouble with timing and brevity. The timing issue is due to users reading, composing, and then sending. During the composition, other messages can get posted to the chat that make your message seem out of context by the time it appears. The brevity problem comes from having to type everything in. Numerous abbreviations are used, and many users don't understand them.
Application sharing is a boon for support as well as general discussions.
It lets you share a current application with other users in the meeting. You can choose to just allow viewing, or provide remote control, whereby a user on another machine controls a single application on yours. You can take control back quickly and easily. Common Whiteboard Support Common whiteboard support is a paint-like application that supports multiple authors simultaneously over the network. You can have multiple whiteboards, and save them to a file.