Using WebSockets for a communications application

You are a consultant hired by an insurance and financial services firm, to create an online system for employees to get breaking financial news as well as to communicate with each other. The company already has a news tracking system that stores relevant news articles and sends an email with the content of the articles to some of the fund managers. The company wants to include this information as well as an instant messenger application and create a simple site for communications for all employees.

Although HTML5 WebSockets appears to be a natural fit to fulfill these requirements, what kind of issues could you run into?
There appear to be two different communications processes going on. Would you use a different socket connection for each one or share the same connection? Explain your answer.
What kind of server-side services do you have to create?