The chat room itself is closed and removed completely with its session log from the server when the last person leaves the room. On the other hand the number of permanent channels should be limited to guarantee that the students do not get lost in an ever growing forrest of permanent channels. Therefore a little password mechanism is required to check the authorization to define a channel as permanent. This right is reserved to professors only. To claim the status as the legal channel owner after having left the channel for a while, the professor has to type in the password he used when he defined the room as permanent.
Professors also have the opportunity to permanently store session logs in their chat room.
Changes being made on the whiteboard during a session are logged and synchronized with the textual information by timestamps. NetChat s feature list currently is very limited. The presented version covers a graphical and textual whiteboard only. A video and an audio player will be added to NetChat s feature list very soon, although both media are not planned to be annotationable. An integral part of NetChat will be a control panel which allows e.g. a professor to define, prepare and present a class within a chat session.