Understood, thanks Tony; perhaps with these comments, I can gather some more ammo to convince management that there are better ways of doing things. I prefer the Slack chat method myself (even IRC is great imho, though antiquated), but management is pushing back stubbornly. We are stuck on v2 of Openfire for this particular reason. 
Is there a way to search history of all chats for a particular user’s comment? For example, I don’t recall if Bob sent a message to @all or to @team or to @me personally. Or would I be relegated to searching each chat separately or could I search all chats for @bob ?