Low Cost Collaborative Tools to Support Student Teams By Parthiv Malani parthivmalani@yahoo.com and Catherine Dwyer cdwyer@pace.edu 9/18/2018

Motivation By 2010 The Gartner Group predicts 60% of an individual’s work product will depend on group input from team members Project teams are increasing working in “virtual mode,” using electronic communication tools to coordinate with other team members E-mail and chat have their limitations More robust collaborative tools are available to support virtual group work This presentation will describes tools available for free or for low cost 9/18/2018

What is wrong with e-mail and chat? Slow -- recently an e-mail took one month to reach its recipient Disorganized – messages are sorted by time or sender, threads can be lost Long discussions and forwards lead to too much information Does not create a public archive, allowing team members to join a project after it has started and catch up on discussions and documents Chat – logs are not usually kept Chats with more than three discussants quickly become chaotic 9/18/2018

What alternatives exist? MicroSoft SharePoint – available through MSDNAA Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) – open source Wiki - free Blogs - free 9/18/2018

Microsoft SharePoint SharePoint is a document management and collaborative groupware tool More functionality for document management and control compared to Blackboard User management and administration Facility of personal and shared sites Role based permissions and views, version control, check-in check-out, calendars, discussions Available through MSDNAA 9/18/2018

SharePoint continued… Integration with MS Office 2003 and .NET architecture as well as other Microsoft products Full text search capability Can be used to manage curriculum of a school. e.g. Eugene M. Isenberg School of Management at UMASS – Amherst Provides workspaces for teams. Students can share documents and collaborate through these team workspaces -Capability to make modifications in content layout. 9/18/2018

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Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) Developed by MITRE in 1993 MITRE is a non profit organization managing federally funded projects for military Available as open source via www.sourceforge.net Provides different “rooms” to allow geographically dispersed people to collaborate, similar to chatting rooms Much more powerful than instant messengers Allows document sharing 9/18/2018

CVW continued… Persistence – documents and other information will remain in the room even when all users are logged out Private discussions and conferencing between two users during a public discussion or conference Allows video and audio conferencing Facility of “room recorder” A “shared whiteboard” to allow common editing of an image or diagram Search facility for users, documents 9/18/2018

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Wiki Main strength – “Open Edit” Allows any user to freely create and edit web page content using any browser Features like history, versions, orphan pages, sandbox, open tasks and hyperlink Markup Language – engine specific formatting language, easy to learn and implement Accepts HTML content as well Students can use a Wiki to post project milestones, bugs, status and reports Wiki is made up of web pages supported by Wiki engine 9/18/2018

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Blogs Blog stands for web log Basically an online diary or journal Can be created without having knowledge of HTML, FTP or web designing tools Contains messages posted by author depending on his interest and comments by other members Most recent message first Features like archiving, calendar 9/18/2018

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Summary Modern knowledge workers will mostly interact with team members in ‘virtual mode’ E-mail and chart is not the only way to collaborate Blog, Wikis, SharePoint, and CVW all have greater functionality, and provide more support for collaborative work, and are available for free or low cost 9/18/2018