4.5.3 BSCW groups as members

All current members of a Workspace form a BSCW group called 'Members of <Workspace name>'. Vice versa, any BSCW group has a shared Workspace associated with it.

BSCW groups are a useful tool for the administration of Workspace membership or shared mailing lists and for the management of access rights. In particular, a BSCW group lets you store and update the assignment of persons to a task in a single place and use this information in many places (for instance for assigning access rights) with an automatic update based on the changes of membership in the BSCW group.

• Create Workspaces for small groups of people who are related by their function or the tasks they perform -- defining function or task as appropriate to your application area. Taking an international research project as an example, you might want to create six Workspaces (= BSCW groups) for

(1) the local heads of the subprojects in each participating research center,

(2) - (4) three groups of researchers, e. g. clustered by discipline,

(5) the local sys admins,

(6) the local accountants responsible for the subprojects.

Obviously, people may be members of more than one of these basic Workspaces, e. g. a head of a subproject or a sys admin might be a researcher at the same time.

• Click    on the top button bar in the Members page of each of these six Workspaces

to add the BSCW group formed by all the members to your Address Book.

• Invite these BSCW groups as members to create new Workspaces, e. g. for
• Budget control and financial reporting: heads of subprojects (Workspace 1) and local accountants (Workspace 6)
• Everybody working on the project: (Workspaces 1 - 6)

in a way that is very convenient and at the same time offers an internal structure that would allow you to assign different access right to the different groups of members in a Workspace. (As an example, in the 'Budget control and financial reporting' Workspace the BSCW group 'heads of subprojects' might be allowed only 'read' access very easily.)

BSCW lets you retrofit this kind of structure based on BSCW groups (= Workspace membership). However, this action is for experienced users only.

• Select entries in a Members page, in a Participants page or in your Address Book page.
• Click    on the button bar for selected objects

to bring up the 'New group' form that lets you enter the name of the new Workspace.

• Click

to create a new Workspace (= BSCW group). The selected entries "disappear" from the list where you selected them; they are replaced by the new entry 'Members of <Workspace name>'.

• Click this new entry

to display the new Workspace's Members page. There you now find the individual entries for the members of the new BSCW group.

Note:

If you have selected for this new BSCW group entries that represent pending users of the BSCW server (see section 4.5.1), BSCW will automatically re-invite them to register.

This Workspace will show up on the top level in the    Folders of all its members.

As a side-effect of creating this BSCW group and the new Workspace with a subset of the members of the original Workspace, the original Workspace will no longer appear in its usual location in the Folder hierarchies of these members. It will now be embedded within the newly created Workspace that is located in the    Folders of these members.

As you have modified other people's Folder hierarchies, you may want to contact them and advise them to move the new Workspace to some unobstrusive location, but not to delete it.

Note:

You may have created this BSCW group as a kind of personal mailing list. In this case you should take the time to modify the access rights of the Workspace members (for details see section 4.7) and to deny the members the right to add or remove other members. If you leave the default access right in effect, some other member might inadvertently edit what you consider as your private address list, though it is, in reality, a shared address list.