Document events
Document events are concerned with reading,
modifying and creating documents in a workspace and are evaluated by BSCW to
indicate, e.g., who has read the documents that a certain member has created or
who has created the documents that a certain member has read. The document
events of a workspace can also be represented graphically as an event map.
Tags
Tags are informally chosen keywords for
the classification of documents, folders and blog entries. Tags may be used in
searches for such
objects.
Blogs
A blog (short
for Web log) consists of a sequence of entries, which are displayed in reverse
chronological order. The blog entries themselves are usually rather short HTML
documents. Blogs differ in who may read the entries and who may add new entries.
Blogs are displayed in a specific layout.
Templates
Template folders are special folders
containing templates which may be copied to other folders. Templates can be
arbitrary BSCW objects, e.g. documents of any kind, polls, flow folders, tasks
and even folders including their entire contents. Typical examples of
templates are letter or spreadsheet templates with elaborate layout and
formats plus complex formulas in the case of spreadsheets.
Website folders
Website folders provide a convenient way to create
and manage a miniature website inside BSCW. Apart from the HTML documents
(“pages”) making up the contents of the website, a website folder has two
special documents: the home page and the layout page, the latter serving as the
standard framework for all other HTML documents of the website folder.
Additionally, website folders have a built-in element system, allowing you
to include BSCW system features into the pages of a website folder.
Online status
display
The online status display indicates the “BSCW
presence” of members of a shared workspace, i.e. their online status with regard
to their activity in BSCW. The online status display may be switched on and off
and consists of clickable entries that may be used for initiating contacts.
BSCW Desktop
Client
The BSCW Desktop client is a local application that
supports the upload of large numbers of documents very efficiently. BSCW Desktop
additionally provides data protection and digital signatures for documents in
shared workspaces using the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption method.
Outlook synchronization
Outlook synchronization supports the
synchronization of contacts and appointments in BSCW with corresponding data in
Microsoft Outlook, i.e. BSCW users working on a Windows platform may synchronize
their BSCW contact lists and personal or group calendars with an Outlook client
on their local computers.
Various other
improvements
Searching in BSCW has been
accelerated using PyLucene for
indexing document contents as well as metadata of other object types. Communities have been completely reimplemented to
also support large communities without loss of
performance.