Personal objects

In BSCW, every user has direct access to a number of personal objects, the icons of which are shown in the instant access bar in the upper right-hand corner of the Web-based user inter­face. The instant access bar is present in each of your folder pages.

The personal objects cannot be shared with other users of your BSCW server.

  Personal portal

  Home folder

  Communities

  Clipboard

  Trash

  Address book

  Calendar

  Task list

  Bookmarks

  Personal templates

  Briefcase

  Your personal portal for BSCW can show the contents of important workspaces, an overview of recent BSCW events, current appointments from your BSCW calendar or your BSCW microblog messages. Your portal is configured by yourself.

  Your home folder is your personal workspace, which may only be accessed by yourself and which contains all folders that you have created and all workspaces where you have been invited as a member. When you click your home folder icon from within other personal ob­jects, you return to the workspace that you viewed last; clicking again on the home folder icon brings you indeed to your home folder.

  The listing of your community workspaces contains all such workspaces with commu­nities where you are a member. Communities allow workspace access for large groups of users equipped with equal access rights keeping performance independent of community size; they also offer self-organized platforms for users with similar interests.

  The address book is mainly used to invite new members to your workspaces.

  The calendar helps you manage your appointments. In addition to this personal calen­dar, BSCW offers group calendars to support cooperation in arbitrary workspaces. These group calendars are stored in the respective workspaces.

  This personal data area contains the tasks that you are to carry out (includes proper tasks, tasks in flow folders and documents to be released). The icon changes its appearance if there are tasks for you to carry out.

  Bookmarks offer quick access to important objects. This personal data area contains those bookmarks that you have collected.

  The personal templates contain templates for often-used objects (e.g. documents, folder structures) that you have defined for copying from, and metadata profiles that you have defined in addition to the predefined system profiles.

  The briefcase contains documents you want to have synchronized with their counter­parts on your local computer.

Personal portal, bookmarks, personal templates, clipboard and trash are described in more detail in the following subsections.