Accessing folders anonymously

All objects of a BSCW server that have been published by allowing ano­nym­ous access via action  Access    Public Access  are listed in the public space of the server, which is a com­munity folder named ‘public’. You reach the public space as follows:

•      Click my communities in the instant access bar or

•      select  GoTo    My Communities  in the top menu. This presents the folder ‘Communities of your-user-name’ containing all community workspaces with communities where you are a member.

•      Open the community workspace ‘public’, which contains all objects that have been pub­lished on your BSCW server.

Alternatively you may also reach the public space as an anonymous user:

•      Select  GoTo    Public Space  in the top menu. This presents the folder ‘Communities of anonymous’ containing the workspace ‘public’.

•      Open the workspace ‘public’ to view all objects that have been published on your BSCW server.

The latter way of accessing the public space lets you view the objects that have been made publicly available as an anonymous user, without having to terminate your current BSCW session under your own user name. This is especially useful when you moderate a workspace with public access. You may then check very quickly how the public part of the workspace looks like from the perspective of an anonymous user in the World-Wide Web.

If you want to create a link to a BSCW object, that allows anonymous access in a public Web page, you should proceed as follows:

•      Copy the object’s URL in BSCW (most Web browsers are able to copy the URL of a link to the local clipboard).

•      Modify the URL so that it by-passes the login procedure and accesses the object di­rectly by replacing .../bscw/... by .../pub/....

•      Insert the modified URL, e.g., into your home page to allow direct access to the BSCW object from your home page.

The modification of the URL is demonstrated in the following example. Let the internal ad­dress of an object be:

http://your-bscw-server/bscw/bscw.cgi/d18147/some.doc

The bold part of this address must be replaced for anonymous access as shown below:

http://your-bscw-server/pub/bscw.cgi/d18147/some.doc

Replacing “bscw” by “pub” has the effect that the BSCW login procedure (which is normally started when a user accesses the BSCW server) is by-passed. Access control, however, is not by-passed: BSCW returns an error message if anonymous access is not allowed for the object requested.