ocPortal Tutorial: Running a collaboration centre: the Collaboration Zone

Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts

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 (if the latter group exists).

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' usergroup.

Table of contents

ocPortal Tutorial: Running a collaboration centre: the Collaboration Zone

Virtues of on-line collaboration

The Collaboration Zone menu

The Internet, combined with ocPortal, is a powerful tool for online-collaboration. It provides the ability for people across the world to work together; but even when used by people working in the same building it can still be a great aid in the sharing and organising of information.

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 solicit help with them)
A page about how the Super-Member can request web-hosting-space
A link for the Super-Member to manage their author profile

These may be used, deleted, or moved, according to your specific needs.

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.

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

Other Super-members

The Super-members fellows page

The Collaboration Zone includes a page listing all members that have access, with links to information relating to them, and to contact them. It exists to make sure super-members are aware of each other, and to facilitate easy communication between them.

Additional resources that may be used

The following are not by default set up for specifically for Super-Members, 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.

Concepts

Super-Member: A member given access to collaboration facilities
Collaboration Zone: The zone where isolated collaboration facilities are located
File-Dump: A tool to allow members to store their own files