No. 23

August 16, 2000

 

Technology:

BSCW

I must admit that I am disturbed by the fact that so many software vendors have their modus operandi so similar to drug pushers: start by offering their wares to the public at a very low price or for free, and then, when the addiction starts to kick in, gradually increase the price, sometimes to exorbitant levels. It makes me feel like an accomplice in a murky  scheme, since quite a few of the tools I loved and recommended now cost significantly more than when they were introduced into the market:
  • O'Reilly's WebBoard was the best discussion board software and an amazing bargain at $300 per server. It is still the best, but in 3 years its price jumped to $1,700!
  • Placeware Auditorium's licenses could be had for a one-time fee of $500 per seat ($300 with educational discount). Now they cost $300 per seat... annually!
  • DocuShare's pricing did not increase as dramatically, but the vendor refuses to issue additional licenses for older versions of the software (a 5-minute clerical job), insisting that the clients upgrade to the newest version (a $10,000 proposition for a site with 200 users!)
Yet I feel that I have no choice but to identify and promote excellent tools, and that my responsibility is mitigated by the fact that I have no way of knowing which vendors will become greedy when their product gains a foothold in the marketplace. Although, to be quite honest, it is not so difficult to identify vendors, who are not likely to start charging their customers through the nose: the distributors of solid, inexpensive, no-frills products that may have most of the features of their more pricey competitors, but lack their "cutting edge" flair. Products like the UBB (reviewed in the No. 22 of Spotlight) or BSCW - Basic Support for Cooperative Work.

BSCW's admittedly somewhat dated interface hides a pleasingly robust document management system, akin to DocuShare and TeamWave Workplace. It allows easy creation of shared workspaces, accessible with a standard browser or an optional Java client. Owners of these workspaces can assign fine-grained access rights to team members, allowing them to store and retrieve files (while maintaining version control), add annotations and ratings to documents, participate in asynchronous discussions. An integrated e-mail system allows users to send messages to and from BSCW, and to receive automatic notifications of activity in the workspace. BSCW server can recognize 30 file formats but will accept almost any type of file, including compressed archives (e.g. zip or tar). In addition, file conversion utility allows users to convert files from one format to another, e.g. a proprietary spreadsheet format into HTML.

Developed by the GMD Information Technology Research Center in Sankt Augustin (Germany), BSCW has been transformed into a commercial product and is being distributed by a GMD spinoff company, Orbiteam Software GmbH, with license fees ranging from EUR 67 to EUR 14 per registered user, depending on the total number of users. Its interface is available in multiple languages (e.g. German, English, Spanish, French) and the server runs on several OS platforms, including Windows NT and various flavors of Unix. Full-featured trial version can be downloaded from OrbiTeam's Web site and evaluated at no cost for 90 days.

BSCW (click on thumbnail):
Browser view 
Java client

For more information please visit the OrbiTeam site or search the ACT database of Groupwork Tools.

Online reading:

"Community Toolbox. Part 1: Online Discussion Boards"
by Vlad Wielbut. (RealMedia format)

It is not so much Online reading as Online viewing and listening but since I have no separate category for the latter in this newsletter, I hope you'll forgive me this small inaccuracy. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of multimedia presentations, describing in details various collaboration technologies that use the World Wide Web as their medium: virtual offices and classrooms, document management systems, synchronous conferencing, etc.

In this presentation I describe the essential components of one of the most popular, cost-effective, and useful groupware tools - online discussion boards. I also discuss their advantages vis-a-vis two older, but still popular group discussion mechanisms: e-mail and listservs. The 30-minute lecture was recorded using RealPresenter, and so it requires a fairly new (7.0 or newer) version of RealPlayer for viewing.

Conference:

EEI21 - MEMPHIS - 2000
  • The Ethics of Electronic Information in the 21st Century Symposium
  • Held October 5-8, 2000 in Memphis, TN
  • The Symposium focuses on the ethical implications of the expansive and pervasive growth of information technology throughout the world. In just a few years the Symposium has drawn scholars from such far-flung locales as the People's Republic of China, South Africa, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain, as well as from universities across the United States. Scholars gather to present their ideas on what they consider the significant societal issues resulting from this explosive technology growth--access vs. accessibility; the driving/funding forces behind technology development and attendant implications; encryption and criminal activity; "flaming" and other Internet behavior; privacy and records access--just to name a few.

She said, he said:

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future." -- Eric Hoffer


© 2000 Vlad Wielbut and the Alliance for Community Technology