Concepts of Collaboration 

The collaborative platform within Knowledge Management of the NetWeaver Enterprise Portal offers the possibility for all integrated solutions to use the generic collaborative services of the Portal.

Portal technologies

Collaboration derives from following Portal technologies:

●     user and role management

●     iView integration

●     navigation

●     portal components and services

●     deployment and technical building blocks

●     content creation

●     portal content catalog (PCD)

Integration with KM

Most parts of Collaboration are strongly integrated into KM. Usually each collaboration object (room, people, discussion, etc.) is a KM resource object as its backend data structure.

Because of that each KM resource can be a starting point for collaboration. For example start a discussion which is attached to a document. At the same time each collaboration object inherits all KM functionality like search, subscription, eventing, administration, configuration, etc. Furthermore Collaboration is accessible via the KM default user interface and brings some extensions to it.

Other KM functionality where Collaboration depends on is:

●     resource as backend data object

●     repository framework (RF) as integration technology to access 3rd party systems (groupware, synchronous collaboration, etc.)

●     KM services and runtime, to extend KM by collaboration functionality

●     Flexible UI

Main Areas of Collaboration

The main areas of Collaboration relevant for developers are:

●     Virtual Rooms

○     Room Parts

○     Room Extensions

●     Groupware Integration

○     Microsoft Exchange

○     Lotus Notes

●     Synchronous Collaboration

○     WebEx

○     RTC

●     People-Centric Collaboration

○     People Picker

○     People Renderer

○     Business Presence Abstraction

●     Collaboration Extensions

○     Collaboration Launch Pad

○     Discussions

○     Voting

○     Notes

○     Quickpoll

○     Sessions