Appointment scheduling
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 (see 7.2
Appointment scheduling).
Personalized
votings
Votings
like polls consist of a number of questions that are to be answered by the
participants. In contrast to polls, votings are not anonymous but by name, i.e.
each participant can see how the others have voted. Additionally, participants
of a voting may be arbitrary persons identified by their user name or email
address, i.e. participants are not restricted to the member
group of the workspace that contains the voting (see 7.3 Polls
and votings).
Automatic
versioning
Version
control may imposed on whole folders and their subfolders, so that all
documents that are newly created and all existing documents that are edited
or replaced are automatically put under version control (see 5.3.7 Automatic versioning).
Personal
portal
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 (see 4.2 Personal portal).
Simple project
management
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 (see 8.1 Tasks
and projects).
RSS feeds
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 (see 4.10 RSS
feeds).
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 (see 5.5.8 Integration of an external wiki
engine).
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, discussion forums, blogs and
contact lists (see 9.3
Exporting in PDF).
Various other developments and
improvements
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.
Task management: Improved
notification, completely revised user interface, filtering in task lists,
documents as data fields (see 8.1 Tasks
and projects).
Extension of
website folders: Filtering by tags and authors, new templates, style sheet
support, simplified editing and preview function, print view for contributions,
wiki automatism for new contents, image upload (see 5.5 Website
folders).
Miscellaneous: New drop uploader, direct editing of
arbitrary document types on the BSCW server, alternative forms of login, direct
creation of shared workspaces in the home
folder.