MindLink Chat Engine

The MindLink Chat Engine (MCE) is the next-generation chat engine created by MindLink. It is designed from the ground up to be a modern, highly-reliable and scalable chat room engine, that can both fill the gap left open by the discontinuation of Microsoft’s Persistent Chat (PChat) and improve the existing platform.

The core objectives are:

• A distributed, robust and horizontally scalability system.
• A secure, attribute-based authentication and authorization mechanism.

The MCE architecture is split into two halves:

• The core engine, against which integration-agnostic chat room activity occurs and is optimised for fast access.
• The administration engine, which integrates with external security attribute systems (Active Directory and third-party attribute servers), determines the access control lists for chat room membership, and propagates them to the core engine.

This duality allows the administrative access control mechanisms to be integrated with multiple systems and have arbitrary complexity without affecting the performance of the running chat system with which users interact.

System requirements

The MindLink Chat Engine has the same underlying system requirements as the MindLink product suite, with the following additional requirements:

• An SQL Server 2016+ database