New Version of BSCW Groupware System Released

by Wolfgang Appelt

A new version of GMD’s BSCW (Basic Support for Co-operative Work) Shared Workspace System has been released. BSCW is an efficient tool for computer supported co-operation via the Web, developed by GMD’s Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) .

Version 3.4 of the BSCW system has been released in May. BSCW is particularly useful for geographically dispersed groups working in a heterogeneous system environment. The system is implemented as an extension to normal Web servers such as the Apache Web Server or the Microsoft NT Internet Information Server and runs on various Unix systems (including Linux), Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems. Today there exist more than 500 BSCW servers world-wide with an estimated user community of well over 100,000.

The new release includes a number of features that have been developed in the CESAR project funded by the European Union’s Telematics Applications Programme. Highlights of the new release are, for example:

• there exists now an indexed based full text search which allows queries in documents stored on BSCW servers in all commonly used document formats.
• users can specify in much more detail than in the previous versions in which way they want to be informed about events in their workspaces
• users can receive notifications about events in their workspaces on their mobile phones via WAP
• in addition to email distribution, documents in BSCW workspaces can now also be directly sent via fax
• user data can also be retrieved from LDAP servers which can save multiple maintenance of user data
• for BSCW system administrators it is now also possible to register users and allocate them to particular work spaces via a script interface which is particularly useful when dealing with large user groups
• by code enhancements the performance of the system could be increased by about 40% for typical BSCW applications.

The system can be used at GMD’s public BSCW server at http://bscw.gmd.de/ and the new release of the software can also be downloaded from there so that interested parties may install their own BSCW servers. Licences may be obtained from OrbiTeam Software GmbH (http://www.orbiteam.de), a GMD spin-off company which has been founded in 1998 to ensure professional support, customer requested modifications and enhancements, and long-term maintenance and development of the system.

Links:
BSCW home page: http://bscw.gmd.de/

Please contact:
Wolfgang Appelt - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 2326
E-mail: appelt@gmd.de