# Administrator Guide

# Overview of Collaboration

This chapter provides a basic overview of Collaboration. It describes the components of Collaboration and how they interact with the portal. It includes the following sections:

- What is Collaboration
- AquaLogic Interaction Components
- Collaboration Basics

## What is Collaboration

Collaboration is a component of BEA AquaLogic Interaction. Collaboration integrates directly with AquaLogic Interaction to provide security, search, and other functionality provided by the portal. Collaboration extends this functionality to provide online work spaces that let users work together on a collaborative level.

Some of the features Collaboration provides include:

- Document management and library services
- Notifications, subscriptions, and alerts
- Project and process management
- Task assignment and calendars
- Threaded discussions

## AquaLogic Interaction Components

This section describes the components of AquaLogic Interaction that are used by Collaboration.

### Portal

The portal lets users access portal content via My Pages, Community pages, the Knowledge Directory, and search. It also lets users perform some administrative actions such as view portlet preferences and manage communities.

### Portal and Collaboration Databases

The portal database stores the data used by the portal. This includes information about user profiles, security, and all portal objects. The portal database does not store the documents available through the portal. Source documents are left in their original locations.

The Collaboration database stores the data used by Collaboration. This includes calendar, task, discussion, and subscription information. It also includes information about the documents used by Collaboration. The Collaboration database does not store these documents; they are stored in the Document Repository Service.

### Image Service

The Image Service serves images and other static content used by the portal system. You can connect multiple Administrative Portals and Portals to one installation of the Image Service, or each Administrative Portal or Portal can connect to its own installation of the Image Service. You can also combine these approaches.

If you host the Image Service on a computer different from the portal and Collaboration, users' browsers do not need to send security information for every image request, greatly increasing the efficiency of your portal system.

### Search Service

The Search Service hosts the search engine and search collection, which contains text and metadata indexes for objects in the portal (for example: documents, communities, and portlets). If your portal indexes many documents, the search index can grow to be quite large. At times, this collection of files can be equal in size to the sum of the ASCII-representations of all of the documents indexed by your portal. Though this is not generally the case, the computer hosting the search index does need sufficient disk space to handle this. As more documents are brought into your portal, the number of unique words (words not already listed in the index) decreases. Therefore, as the number of documents in your portal increases the index size will slow in its growth.

### Document Repository Service

The Document Repository Service stores content uploaded into the portal system such as images used by the Branding Engine or documents uploaded into Collaboration or Publisher.

## Collaboration Basics

This section describes the core functionality of Collaboration.

### Collaboration Projects

Projects are the core element of Collaboration. Projects contain the tasks and documents that facilitate collaborative work among users. Projects are composed of the following functional areas:

- Calendar
- Tasks
- Documents
- Discussions

### Project Explorer

The Project Explorer lets system administrators and project leaders manage multiple projects from a single window.

### Collaboration Portlets

Collaboration contains a set of portlets that provide access to projects and the Project Explorer. The following sections describe the two types of portlets.

#### Community Portlets

These portlets are placed in communities and allow group access to projects, providing access to multiple projects or functional areas within a project:

Table 2-1 Types of Community Portlets
Portlet Name | Description
--- | ---
Community Announcements | Displays important announcements about a project.
Community Calendar | Displays the events, tasks, and milestones of a project.
Community Discussions | Displays a project's discussions, which facilitate online communication among project users.
Community Documents | Displays documents associated with a project.
Community Projects | Lets users see all of the projects assigned to a community.
Community Tasks | Displays project tasks and task lists.
Project Search | Lets users search the content of text documents and object properties within a project.

User access to projects and functional areas within a project depend on the roles and access levels assigned to each user. For information on security within functional areas, see Access Levels in Functional Areas.

#### My Page Portlets

These portlets can be placed on My Pages by individual users:

Table 2-2 Types of My Page Portlets
Portlet Name | Description
--- | ---
My Announcements | Lets users view project announcements.
My Calendar | Lets users add calendar items from various projects.
My Discussions | Lets users view selected discussions.
My Documents | Displays documents from selected projects.
My Project Search | Lets users search for items in multiple projects.
My Projects | Displays a list of selected projects.
My Tasks | Displays all tasks assigned to a user.

#### Collaboration Profile Portlet

The Collaboration Profile portlet is added to user profile pages to add Collaboration functionality. It should not be added to communities or My Pages.

### Advanced Collaboration Features

The following advanced features allow Collaboration to be used with the Windows desktop and other common applications:

Table 2-3 Descriptions of Advanced Collaboration Features
Advanced Feature | Description
--- | ---
Groupware Integration | Lets you configure and test a back-end groupware server so users can integrate Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes calendars with Collaboration.
Desktop Integration | Lets users integrate Collaboration with the Windows desktop.
Microsoft Project Import | Lets users import Microsoft Project files into a Collaboration calendar.

For more information on using and configuring these features, see Integrating Collaboration.