BSCW 4.5 - What's new?

What's new in BSCW, version 4.5

• User interface design
• Personal portal
• Appointment scheduling
• Projects and tasks
  
• Wiki integration
• RSS feeds
• PDF export 
• Document templates

User interface design

BSCW 4.5 includes a complete 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, direct modification of sorting order, extension of per­sonal pre­fer­ences, configurability of action shortcuts, viewing options per folder, logout button, ... and much more!

Personal portal 

BSCW now comes along with a personal portal as individual and customizable welcome page for each user. 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.

Appointment scheduling

BSCW now supports the scheduling of appointments within a group: 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.

Projects and task management

BSCW supports simple project management by means of projects and phases. 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.

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.

RSS feeds   

BSCW now allows the sharing of RSS feeds within a group workspace. 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.

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, discussions, blogs and con­tact lists.

Document templates

Besides the direct creation of shar­ed work­spaces in the home folder, BSCW now also supports the quick and easy creation of documents via a great number of document templates. Furthermore documents may be directly edited in the web browser upon creation.