What's New in Business Collaborator version 4.9?

Improved Version Control

In Business Collaborator version 4.9, version control has been substantially rewritten to enhance the existing functionality. In particular, events are now associated with specific versions of the document rather than with the document as a whole. It is also possible to construct an online review (see section 17) for different versions of the document. Perhaps the most significant improvement in the versioning tool, however, is the increased flexibility provided for version numbering and version "states" provided via the new document metadata (see section 13) functionality.

Project-specific Metadata

Business Collaborator's former implementation of configurable metadata, although functional, was highly restrictive. Metadata was defined globally, across the whole server forcing all projects to use the same metadata fields. Another significant restriction was that metadata was set on MIME types. Thus all Word documents, no matter what their usage in the project, had the same types of metadata applied to it. Business Collaborator version 4.9 introduces workspace-specific metadata, thus permitting every project to define the types of metadata which apply to that particular document, folder or issue (see figure below).

A metadata schema (see figure below) defines a number of metadata fields of certain types and associates user-defined document and folder types with a selection of these fields. By associating a schema with a workspace, the additional metadata can be applied to a project.

By associating metadata fields of types such as paragraph or date with a document type, all documents of this type may have additional metadata values associated with them. This metadata can be displayed in the user interface and can be used to provide additional search criteria when trying to locate objects. The metadata schema can be used to apply a validity policy - of various levels of severity - to force users to supply meaningful values for the metadata. The schema may also be used to limit access to certain types of document. As well as providing a useful method for categorising documents or folders, metadata fields also determine the types of response required from users responding to a document issue or review.

Document Issuing

Issuing is a new concept, introduced in Business Collaborator version 4.9. Issuing a document means circulating a number of documents to a group of people for a particular purpose, e.g. for information or for approval. The same documents may be issued to different people for different reasons. Equally, the same document may be issued to the same people at different points in the document lifecycle for different reasons.

After a document has been issued, it is immutable, i.e. it cannot be changed. This is because it is essential to preserve the document in the state that it was in when it was read or approved by the people to whom it was issued. This has no impact on further/future versions of the document however. The people amongst whom an issue has been circulated constitute the issue's Distribution List. The Distribution List must be non-empty - you will be prevented from creating an issue without associating a set of people with it. The Issue Sheet for an issue details the Distribution List as well as listing the documents associated with the issue. The Issue Sheet is also the primary route to issue-specific actions such as sending out the issue.

Issues may be of a user-defined metadata type. This type determines the metadata associated with the issue as well as the format of responses to an issue of this metadata type. Although issues usually have a set of documents associated with them, it is possible to construct a documentless issue. This would be useful for sending out form-based information to elicit a response from a number of people.

Collections

A collection is an alternative form of container to the familiar workspace and folder. Unlike a folder, a collection may only contain documents, issues or reviews. A collection is a non-hierarchical structure intended to hold items which do not have a natural folder structure. It is also an ideal way of grouping a large number of documents or issues.

The contents of a collection cannot be browsed in the usual manner. Instead, items may be found by searching within the collection. The collection search page allows a user to filter out the objects from the collection which they are not interested in.

Reviews

In Business Collaborator 4.9, a new concept of Reviews is introduced. Reviews are closely related to issues and so benefit from the wide range of functionality which applies to issues. Like issues, reviews may have a type defined by its metadata. Like issues, reviews are automatically added to a collection called Issues when they are first created. There are, however, a number of important differences between reviews and issues:

1. Reviews must always be associated with a set of documents whereas an issue may be a documentless issue.
2. Responses to an issue which has been sent out are per user per document but responses to a review are per user, with all comments pertaining to all the documents being reviewed. (see figure below)
3. Documents are not made immutable after they are reviewed. However, documents which have been issued may not be changed retrospectively.

bc.support@groupbc.com, September 2003