We have a large distance-learning course running on software from quite a well-known provider of VLEs. They promised us a "whiteboard" feature, which is a kind of glorified chat room that displays pictures on a whiteboard as well as allowing people to chat and we use it for assessed online meetings. When the whiteboard was finally delivered, it turned out to be a stand-alone java app, and our students had great difficulty in getting it running. Most of them needed to download the entire JRE from Sun in order to run the program - and a significant number never actually got it to work. We had to backtrack and use their (rather primitive) normal chat room instead, which lacks various features that we need. We need a solution that 100% of students can use, no buts. Are we stuck with a bog-standard chat room for ever? Is it at all likely that the application could be re-written as an applet - and would this increase the likelihood that all the students could access it or not? any other ideas?

Use Microsoft LiveMeeting.