About shared containers About conferences About folders About workspaces The General Conferences folder Renaming conferences Controlling access to conferences Setting conference permissions Using unpublished conferences and workspaces About conferences A conference is an online forum for user discussion. You can also think of it as a shared Mailbox used for messages on a particular topic. Conferences have permissions associated with them to control access by individual users or groups of users. They have expiry periods to delete old messages automatically. Conferences can be shared with other FirstClass servers over gateways, and can offer access to Internet newsgroups through NNTP (for information, see Understanding Internet services protocols). The Conferences container, which is a standard object on all users' Desktops is a repository for conferences that can be accessed by all system users. This is a good place to post public information, updates and news about your organization that everyone needs to know. Monitored conferences that are used by selected groups of users are created in the General Conferences folder on the administrator’s Desktop. This folder is only visible to the administrator and subadministrators. As administrator, you make selected conferences within this folder visible to the appropriate users or groups by granting subscriptions, adding them to model Desktops, or placing a link to a conference in a public place. If groups of users, or individual users, are given the Create conferences privilege on the Group Privileges or User Information form, they can also create personal conferences, which they can administer. When new items are received in conferences, the unread flag indicates this. Top About folders A folder is an online repository for information. It can be used to archive information, or to file information, memos, uploaded files, documents, and messages about a certain topic. Unlike conferences, you cannot address messages to a folder. However, you can use rules to move messages automatically into shared folders. Folders created within conferences do not inherit group membership, or expiry, but they do inherit the view properties of the parent conference. Folders, by default have an expiry period of Never. Therefore, folders are the ideal option for use in archiving information. There is no unread flag used for folder. Top About workspaces A workspace is a collection of collaboration containers users can create to organize and manage projects. If the user is given the Share workspaces privilege, he can create a workgroup and share these containers with other group members. Top The General Conferences folder When you install FirstClass, there are some conferences already created in the General Conferences folder. These conferences can be used as they are, customized, or deleted to create a structure that best fits your organization. When installing a new system, you can run a one-time script to customize the conferences in the General Conferences folder. After installing your new system, log in as administrator and open the "Start Here" conference on the administrator's Desktop. In the Groups and Conferences area there is a form with instructions to walk you through the renaming of these items. This script can only be run once. The existing conferences match the Department groups of the default network store. There is a collaboration area (conference) for each Department group. Inside each of the preconfigured conferences is a message archive folder to move old messages to instead of simply deleting them, and a group calendar for all users to contribute to. You can add as many conferences to this folder as you wish, and you can add as many subconferences within each conference as you require. Top Renaming conferences Changing the name of the original icon for a conference deletes the old name from the Directory, and adds the new name. Changing the name of an alias does not affect the Directory entry. However, messages addressed to the conference must be addressed to the original conference name, not the alias. Note If a renamed original conference is being replicated over a gateway, remote administrators must also change the name of their copy of the conference. Top Controlling access to conferences By default, any user who has a subscription to a conference can open it, send items to it, read items that have been posted to it, and view message histories. When you add a conference to a user group’s Model Desktop, you are subscribing every member of that group to the conference. Top Setting conference permissions You might want to limit the access of specific users or groups to a conference or a group of conferences called a container template. For example, you might want all users to be able to read messages in a certain conference, but you only want a few users to be able to send to it. You can set permissions for individual conferences or you can use container templates to set permissions for a group of conferences, much the same way you set privileges for groups of users with user groups. Permissions are similar to privileges. But while privileges allow you to control access to a great many FirstClass features, permissions relate exclusively to conferences. The Conference Permissions form help explains how the various permissions work and how they interact with privileges. Top Using unpublished conferences and workspaces Unpublished conferences are useful for administrators who do not want to restrict users from creating conferences, but at the same time do not want large numbers of user-made conferences cluttering up the Directory. These conferences will not show up in the Directory under any circumstances, not even the administrator's Directory. This gives them an advantage over unlisted conferences, which can be seen by the administrator and users with the "View unlisted" privilege. Because they never appear in the Directory, unpublished conferences also provide an added level of security. Only subscribers to the conference are able to post to it, by creating a new message from the conference window. No other mail can be received, either locally or over the Internet. An added benefit to unpublished conferences is that the conference name doesn't have to be unique. Since none of the conferences show up in the Directory, you can give multiple conferences the same name (useful for multiple classes). All containers in shared workspaces are unpublished. This provides security as well as making your system less congested with miscellaneous conference, and makes it easier for users to create and name their own objects. Because workspace containers are not seen in the Directory and cannot receive mail, only users who are members of a workgroup can see or post messages to a workspace conference or calendar. This provides a secure and private working environment. The conference and calendar names in workspaces never appear in the Directory and can therefore be duplicates. There will be no confusion if three teachers want to call a conference "grade 3" because these conferences aren't in the Directory and won't cause confusion. There are two ways to create unpublished conferences. First, you can disable the "Publish Directory names" privilege, while enabling the "Create conferences" and "Create calendars" privileges. No conference or calendar that user creates will appear in the Directory. Alternatively, users can with the "Publish Directory names" privilege enabled can still create unpublished conferences by selecting "Do not publish in Directory" on the conference permissions form. Here are some examples of unpublished conferences at work: Example 1 A group of employees have been assigned to work together on a company project. One of them creates workspace and add the others to the workgroup, so they can share resources, questions, progress reports, and completed work amongst themselves without interference from other members of the company. Example 2 A high school art teacher creates shared workspace for her class, putting in notes about different painting techniques, art periods throughout history, and so on. Students in the class, each given an assignment on the life and works of a particular artist, post their work in the workspace for each other to look at and study from for the final exam. The teacher has three different classes, so she creates a workspace for each one. She names them all "Miss Morelli's Art Class" without worrying about duplicate names, as none of them will be in the Directory. The only difference between them in the beginning is the members of the workgroup. Top For more information About container templates Using container templates Conference permissions form Creating custom column layouts