All of your projects in one location

Replace the wealth of e-mails, planning spreadsheets and whiteboards with a simple collaborative workspace for everyone.

BSCW has been utilized in all industries, teams and a wide range of environments for more than 20 years, from research organizations and startups to large companies, from corporate administration and clinical studies to emergency management.

What does BSCW Social offer?

• Modern web app optimized for desktop stations and mobile devices
• Real-time communication: exchange messages and share documents
• Create and join audio and video conferences
• Collaboratively edit Microsoft Office or Collabora Office documents
• Efficient project management thanks to modern task administration, including time planning, also as a ticket system
• Quick search feature for locating frequently-used content
• Shared map services and locations: address and location display
• Customization and branding: select from several predefined designs or customize BSCW to your company’s corporate identity
• Synchronize all meetings and appointments with Outlook, Thunderbird and Mac calendars via CalDAV
• High degree of security: install your own in-house server or take advantage of our hosting services located in Germany
• Barrier-free access thanks to user interface according to BITV 2.0

BSCW Social also offers several proven features of BSCW Classic:

• Meeting coordination
• Surveys/polls (in extremely simple versions)
• Wikis for gathering and collecting knowledge
• Branding of individual work areas using banners
• Document releases (workflows) and digital circulation folders
• Group calendars
• Individual folder activation for incoming e-mails
• Limited-time access to documents for external persons
• Event history, monitoring, revision tracking
• Full-text searches across all documents
• User and user group administration
• Roles and rights management
• Public areas
• Integrated HTML editor
• WebDAV
• LDAP
• OCR
• DSGVO compliant

Task management

With BSCW Social, tasks can be created and shared for each workspace. Tasks in BSCW scale seamlessly from simple todo lists to the planning and execution of extensive projects.

Create tasks, invite colleagues to participate and add any other content. Each task may contain new subtasks, documents or chats. If desired, tasks can be provided with appointments or deadlines, which are automatically added to your calendar as appointments.

 
Time estimation

Each task also provides scheduling tools. Completing or editing a task automatically updates project progress. Estimate the duration of the work and keep an eye on your personal open tasks including the remaining time.

In the progress overview, you can always see the number of completed, assigned and open tasks.

Time recording and statistics

Users can individually decide whether BSCW should also automatically record working and online time. In doing so, unplanned interruptions of tasks are also recorded by BSCW.

The data is solely in the hands of the individual users. Each user decides which information is only used for their own analysis or shared with other colleagues via export.

Good communication is the key to good collaboration

E-mail has dominated digital enterprise communications for many years. But there is an even more effective approach. BSCW promotes direct communications to not only increase productivity, but to provide a better overview.

With BSCW, you not only save time and money, but have fun have at the same time!

The chat feature offers you a wide range of possibilities:

Audio and video conferences direct in BSCW

Especially in times when flexible work and home office environments are growing in popularity, uncomplicated and location-independent collaboration with colleagues is becoming more important.

Use BSCW to meet up directly in a folder and invite other users to your conference. Thanks to the integration of Jitsi, audio and video conferences can be conducted directly in your browser without installing additional software. The monitor can also be shared at any time with coworkers.

Document management made easy

Working with documents can be tedious and chaotic. BSCW is designed to help you intuitively manage your documents.

• Change notifications
• Version management and back-up function
• Rights management
• Document templates
• Document release process

Direct Document Editing

• Text and HTML documents may be edited directly in your Web browser
• Office documents may be edited directly by using the Online-Office Add-On
• All types of documents may be edited directly by using their respective local applications and the BSCW Desktop Extension

Increase productivity with the Online-Office Add-On

Create documents directly in BSCW and simultaneously edit them online, together with other users.

Combine your BSCW with Microsoft Office Online, ONLYOFFICE or Collabora Office in order to work together on documents directly in BSCW.

Overview of all appointments – time planning made easy

Group calendars provide you an overview of your team’s meetings and appointments at any time, so that you can stay up-to-speed on upcoming events. Coordinate and invite coworkers to meetings with just a few clicks. All members of a group can view upcoming events. Group calendars can be integrated into your personal calendar as well. If an appointment or meeting is changed, all participants are immediately notified.

Does your own calendar app have a special place in your heart?

Not to worry! The BSCW calendar can be used together with all common calendar programs and apps. That means you can easily integrate group appointments and meetings into your private calendar.

Meeting coordination made easy

Search directly in BSCW to find a suitable day for the next meeting and port the result over to the group calendar. Apart from internal users, external persons can also be invited to confirm their attendance.

Surveys and polls

BSCW Chat offers a flexible way to conduct simple ad-hoc survey via reactions. Note: BSCW Classic offers a comprehensive survey tool in addition.

Individual branding/themes

As a BSCW user, switch between different designs. Enhance folders with their own icons or add custom title bars with images and descriptions to a workspace.

Use BSCW in your preferred design – bright or dark – or create a special theme that matches your corporate identity. Apart from creating your own logo, you can adapt the complete color scheme to your needs.

 
Many new enhancements

The new map feature is based on Open Street Maps, so that all of the data remains on your server.

Thanks to the new quick search feature, you can promptly find frequently used documents and folders everywhere.
The quick search feature ideally supplements the complex full-text search that you are already familiar with in the BSCW Classic platform.

And of course the BSCW Social user interface was developed so that it optimally adapts to all common end user devices. You can launch BSCW at anytime direct from your PC, smartphone or tablet.

 
Best of BSCW Classic

Apart from all of these improvements, BSCW Social adopted numerous proven features from the BSCW Classic platform.

That means users continue to have access to the familiar Wikis for assembling knowledge. In addition, document release (workflow), as well as the digital circulation folder, is also offered as part of BSCW Social. You can also activate individual folders for incoming e-mails or give external persons access rights to a folder or document.

The extensive roles and rights management feature was also adopted in its entirety from the BSCW Classic platform. That means you can administer complex user groups and create public areas.

We HOST the service for you.
No technical knowledge is required.

We manage the technical stuff in the background so that you can carry out your activities worry-free.

Register now and test BSCW Social for 90 days at no cost!

Take a look at our prices!

Prefer to host the service in-house?
We can support you!

Download the BSCW server software now and learn how you can save costs by hosting the service yourself.

Download now and test BSCW Social for 90 days at no cost!

Take a look at our prices!

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Download BSCW Social

Download the current version for your server today.

Take advantage of the opportunity to test BSCW for 90 days at no cost.

Please read the installation instructions and the additional information in the administrator’s manual. When upgrading an existing BSCW-Server, please also check the upgrade hints in the administrator’s manual.

I have read and I accept the licence agreement and the copyright notice.

BSCW-Server-Distribution for Unix:
Installation hints | Version history

You wish to run BSCW inside of a Docker environment? Please contact us!

End User System Requirements (Client)

• Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer (version 11), Safari
• JavaScript (required)
• Platforms: Windows PC, Unix/Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android

Additional Requirements

• Alternative access through WebDAV applications and MS Office
• Some optional features require Java (Java plugin version 1.7 or later)

Server Platform System Requirements

• UNIX operating system: Linux  (z.B. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu), BSD
• Apache-Web-Server (version 2.4)
• External SMTP server on UNIX/Windows or local SMTP server (e.g., postfix/sendmail on UNIX) required for mail delivery
• Software packages required for installation:
  • Python Runtime Environment – version 3
    (www.python.org , Open Source)
  • The index-based full text search (optional) additionally requires the PyLucene software (version 3.6)
• A supplementary database is not required.

The server platform hardware resources depend on the number of users and server load. The following example is a BSCW server configured with enough capacity to service around 200 users:

• Intel Core/Xeon or AMD A-series/OpteronTM (>3.2 GHz) based 64bit server system, at least 4 cores
• 8 GB RAM, min. 500 GB HDD

Access to the server is through a web browser (or other clients such as WebDAV Explorer or MS Office) exclusively using HTTP protocol (port 80) or via an SSL connection (port 443).

Installation of BSCW Desktop Extension

BSCW External Editor for Windows

BSCW External Editor for Mac

Download the BSCW desktop extension installation program and execute the installer. After installation, change your personal preferences by calling

• Main menu / Preferences / File Handling

In section External editors, select what document types you want to be directly edited by local applications, e.g. Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer.

When you now select a file for editing on the desktop in BSCW, a .zem file is downloaded first. If necessary, select when opening this file for the first time that files of this type should always be opened with the BSCW desktop extension – respectively Zope editor.

The BSCW desktop extension is based on the Zope External Editor and was originally developed by members of the Zope/Plone community for the content management framework Zope. The software is provided under the Zope Public License. OrbiTeam provides a Zope External Editor edition which is optimized for BSCW.

Trouble shooting

Windows Defender warnings: You may ignore Windows Defender warnings and proceed with the installation. The BSCW desktop extension, is a rather recent development and not yet treated as a trusted application.

Proxy Server: If you are using a proxy server, you have to configure the BSCW desktop extension so that it also uses this proxy server. Using Windows, you can easily edit the configuration file of the BSCW desktop extension (ZopeEdit.ini) by starting the BSCW desktop extension from the Start menu. Check your local proxy configuration in your Web browser (or ask your system administrator) and enter the details into the configuration file of the BSCW desktop extension (proxy, proxy_user, proxy_pass). More configuration hints are available in the README.