Creating an Archive transform copies of a set of objects (Folders, Documents etc.) into one compact Document that saves storage space and download time. Creating an Archive is especially useful for downloading numerous or big files as fast and cost-effectively as possible.
Actually, making and extracting an archive can be used for uploading multiple files to a Workspace just as well: for Documents of MIME types Tar and Zip/Winzip, BSCW offers the [Extract] action that re-creates in your Bag the files (= Documents) included in the archive that you produced locally.
Encoding typically further reduces the file size of a Document, i. e. the storage space requirements and the time to download an archive Document.
You need a matching program on your local system to de-encode an encoded file in order to make it usable again, and extract from an archive the individual objects (files) it contains. Please make sure all members of your Workspace have the necessary extraction programs installed on their machines and have configured their Web browser to start these programs when they encounter the MIME type of a (encoded) archive file.
Your Bag may be helpful in bringing together objects from "distant" locations that you need to include in one archive file (see section 3.61).
on the button bar for selected objects to bring up the 'Create an archive' form. It includes a menu of the archive types that BSCW can produce, and the compression / encoding that may be applied to the archive file.
BSCW will write the archive Document to your Bag (see section 3.6.1) and then display a form which lets you immediately download the Document.