Historically, clients have used email and telephone to participate in collaborative
design discussions with a remote R&D lab.
Additional tools, such as Net Meeting and WebEx, have embodied collaborative
sessions with the power to share and view documents dynamically. What has been missing,
until now, is a secure collaborative website where ideas, reviews, comments, schedules, etc.
can be easily edited and extended by any participant at their convenience.
Fortunately, the open-source community has produced several versions of a web site
tool, known as a wiki, that provides just
such a capability without requiring knowledge of web page design to use it. However,
the public nature of most wiki sites is incompatible with our need to share
proprietary data among invited users only. ATG Labs has therefore modified
a version of twiki to permit only those users with
the correct login and password to view and modify a project's twiki website.
So how does it work? Rather than trying to explain the benefits of our secure,
collaborative twiki, you can log into our
guest version of twiki and explore for yourself, using "guest" as the
login and "guest" as the password.
Here are some of the uses for the collaborative twiki we have developed.