Appointment scheduling
An appointment scheduling
helps in finding an agreeable date for a group appointment. The
participants vote on several date proposals. Participants may be BSCW users
as well as other persons and are notified via email. The
organizer determines the final date of the appointment depending on
the outcome of the voting and all participants are informed about this
date (see 7.2
Appointment scheduling).
Personalized votings
Votings like polls consist of a number of questions that are to be
answered by the participants. In contrast to polls, votings are not anonymous
but by name, i.e. each participant can see how the others have voted.
Additionally, participants of a voting may be arbitrary persons identified by
their user name or email address, i.e. participants are not
restricted to the member group of the workspace that contains the voting
(see 7.3 Polls and votings).
Automatic versioning
Version control may imposed on whole folders and their subfolders, so
that all documents that are newly created and all existing documents that
are edited or replaced are automatically put under version control (see
5.3.7 Automatic versioning).
Personal portal
Your
personal portal for BSCW is meant to be a personalized starting page for a quick
and direct access to important information on your BSCW server and often
used external applications. It can show the contents of important
workspaces, an overview of recent BSCW events and current appointments from
your BSCW calendar. You can also include external programs to show you the
latest news or the current weather forecast, to connect you to
communication services or to let you find an address on a map. You may also
create portals for arbitrary workspaces (see 4.2 Personal
portal).
Simple project management
Projects and phases support project management through time planning
and progress control. Both types of objects are implemented as special folders,
which may contain further material. The time frame of a project is given by
start and completion date. Projects may be further split up in phases,
which may be further divided into tasks. The progress of a project is aggregated
from the lower levels, i.e. subtasks, tasks, phases, to the top level, the
project, and is indicated in the folder overview. Start and end of projects
and tasks may be visualized as bar charts, which is also true for other
time-related objects (see 8.1 Tasks
and projects).
RSS feeds
RSS feeds provide
abstracts of frequently updated material (e.g. news, blogs) on the Web in a
standardized format. In BSCW, RSS feed objects are special folders that store
the latest abstracts of an RSS feed as RSS articles (see 4.10 RSS
feeds).
Wiki integration
As a complement
to using website folders to generate a sort of wikis inside BSCW, the external
MoinMoin wiki engine may be integrated into BSCW on the workspace level. The
existence of a wiki is indicated by a link in the workspace banner.
Following the link leads to the wiki with automatic authentication under
the respective user name (see 5.5.8 Integration of an external wiki
engine).
PDF export
Listings of many container
objects, i.e. objects that can contain other objects, may be exported in PDF
format for printing. Examples are folders, discussion forums, blogs and
contact lists (see 9.3
Exporting in PDF).
Various other developments and
improvements
Revision of the user
interface: Redesign of icons and action forms, integrated search field,
tooltips for most interface objects, dynamic layout with automatic resize when
browser window is resized, right mouse click invocation of action menus,
type filtering in folder listings, direct modification of sorting order,
extension of personal preferences, configurability of action
shortcuts, viewing options per folder.
Task
management: Improved notification, completely revised user interface,
filtering in task lists, documents as data fields (see 8.1 Tasks
and projects).
Extension of website folders:
Filtering by tags and authors, new templates, style sheet support, simplified
editing and preview function, print view for contributions, wiki automatism for
new contents, image upload (see 5.5 Website
folders).
Miscellaneous: New drop uploader, direct editing of
arbitrary document types on the BSCW server, alternative forms of login, direct
creation of shared workspaces in the home
folder.