ocPortal Tutorial: Running a collaboration centre: the Collaboration Zone
Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts
The collaboration zone described in this tutorial is only available in the enterprise version of ocPortal, but the regular version of ocPortal does contain many of the features mentioned.
ocPortal includes many features that allow your website to function, in whole or in part, as an on-line collaboration tool. Many of these features are, by default, pooled together and placed in the 'Collaboration Zone', an ocPortal zone available, by default, only to staff and Super-Members.
A Super-Member is a member who is not staff, but is granted additional access, based on their need to access collaborative resources. There is no hard-coded concept of a Super-Member in ocPortal, but the default configuration for the Collaboration Zone is to grant access only to staff and the 'Super Members' user-group (if it exists).
Table of contents
Virtues of on-line collaboration
The Collaboration Zone menu |
ocPortal can be used to organise shared documents, provide a forum for discussion, make announcements, structure information, chat from across the world, and a lot more.
Default settings
By default, some resources (Comcode pages, menu links, and catalogues), are created in the Collaboration Zone:- A 'Projects' catalogue (so that super-members can advertise projects they are working on, to encourage collaboration on them)
- Links for the 'choose what to edit' pages of various types of resource (which will only show items that may be edited in the list, which by default are only those the super member created themselves)
- A page about how the Super-Member can request web-hosting-space
- A link to 'Chat moderation' so that the Super-Member can moderate chat rooms
- A link for the Super-Member to manage their author profile
File Dump
Important note
There is nothing stopping ordinary users from downloading from the file-dump if they have the URL to a file. This is sometimes useful, but you should be aware that if files are given guessable file-names, they will not be secure.
The File Dump |
The file dump is a tool to allow sharing of files. It provides the ability to upload, download, and delete files, and organise files into folders.
Other Super-members
The Super-members fellows page |
Additional resources that may be used
The following are not set up for easy/specific Super-Member use by default, but may be:- Blogs (Personal news categories)
- Personal galleries
- Private forums
- Private chat rooms
- Sole access to any ocPortal feature, such as the download system, or CEDI (the community database).
If an ocPortal website is intended solely for collaboration, and the collaborators are trusted, it might be a good idea to make each of them staff, rather than a super-member.