What's the best way to keep users at your site once you've gotten them there? Get them engaged in a conversation with the new Microsoft® Chat Control, an ActiveX™-based control for chats. By inserting the Microsoft Chat Control into your Web pages, you instantly create a place where people can meet and chat with each other for hours.

The Microsoft Chat Control allows two or more users who are connected to a chat server to carry on a conversation—communicating with both text and data. The ActiveX control provides a default user interface that is completely customizable, or you can design a custom user interface using the Microsoft Chat Control. The control has an optional user interface that's very flexible, allowing authors to include a Send button, Whisper button, Participant list box, History text box, and Send text box.

You can use Microsoft Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript) to insert the Microsoft Chat Control into a Web page. The Microsoft Chat Control can also be used in any OLE container application to create a chat client. Both implementations enable conversations between multiple users on client computers accessing a common chat server over the Internet.

If you've installed Internet Explorer, you can check out the Microsoft Chat Control. This will download the Microsoft Chat Control if you do not have the control already.

To find out more about using the Microsoft Chat Control, download the Microsoft Chat Control SDK.