Users of a content management system (CMS) collaboratively work together to create, review, and edit the content items in the shared folder. The CMS provides a messaging service that allows the users to exchange messages and automatically recommends chat groups to users based on their shared folders and a level of collaboration determined for each content item in a shared folder. To determine collaboration, the CMS obtains user interactions performed by the users on content items in the shared folder and determines a collaboration value for the shared folder based on a function of weight frequencies of user interactions for each content item. If the collaboration value is greater than a threshold collaboration value, the CMS recommends that the user create a chat group with the users of the shared folder.