UNITE WEB-BASED COLLABORATION SOFTWARE
The Brain Institute at the University of Utah and the Office of Information Technology administer an innovative tool for interdisciplinary collaboration, called Unite. Unite is powered by Vignette® Collaboration software and is designed to leverage e-mail, common desktop applications, and a single Web-based environment to drive collaboration between University of Utah faculty, staff, and students, and their external colleagues. Unite features include:
- Accessibility — Anyone with a university Network ID (uNID), an internet connection, and a Web browser (either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), can gain access to Unite at the url: unite.utah.edu. Using Unite does not require any software downloads.
- Familiarity — Unite is customized to mirror the look and feel and organizational hierarchy of the University of Utah’s website.
- Security — Unite servers are housed at the University of Utah, are protected by university firewalls, and utilize university authentication services.
- Flexibility — Unite provides a Web-based environment where cross-organizational teams can work “side by side”, without being hampered by distance, time and organizational boundaries.
- Knowledge Management — Unite provides an intuitive framework of containers within which to organize and store information. These containers include: cabinets; folders; discussions; wikis; blogs; Web links; calendars; and task lists. Documents, e-mails, and other data can be uploaded or entered directly into appropriate Unite containers and shared with colleagues. All information stored in Unite is searchable and reusable.
- Role-based Security — All items added to or created within the Unite database have an associated access policy that governs who can see the item and what can be done with the item. For instance, access policies grant or restrict permission to view an item, to add or remove items, and to modify an item. Access policies allow specific roles (e.g., reader, contributor, editor) to be assigned to specific users or groups of users in a highly granular fashion to achieve the desired security.
- E-mail Integration — E-mail contributions to the Unite database are accepted from any mail server and any mail manager without modification to the existing e-mail systems. E-mails archived in Unite are fully searchable and contribute to a group’s knowledge base. Unite can also be used to create and distribute e-mail messages to users and groups, and to assign unique, logical email addresses to any Unite group, discussion, folder or object.
- Private Workspaces and Communities — Workspaces and communities are secure silos within Unite. Each workspace and community is created in association with a customized group of users and access policies tailored to achieve the desired security. Workspaces are ideal for managing projects and generally working collaboratively with a team.
- Collaborative Document Authoring — Unite streamlines the often chaotic process of preparing a document with multiple authors, using a variety of customizable processes including approval and versioning. During an approval process, Unite circulates a document sequentially through an approval group, appends comments and records approval status. During document versioning, Unite captures the most recently edited document as the current version, but stores the full sequence of versions for easy reversion.
- Search — Unite includes a powerful full-text indexing and search mechanism for locating information within the database and displaying that information in context. Basic searches quickly locate all objects containing a keyword(s), while advanced searches allow retrieval of objects by textual content, custom metadata, author, date or location in the group memory.
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