One of the best things about Composica is the fact that you can gather a whole lot of people together to do your work for you – or at least help.
I mentioned some of the features of Collaboration, or Teamwork, in my last post, so I’ll go into a little more detail in this one. This is the back-end of Collaboration, the work that goes on between the members of the creative team.
Centrality is in the server, not the group.
Because the Composica application sits on a central server, multiple people can be logged in and working on a single project at the same time. Working on the project really only requires a computer connected to the Internet, a login and password, and a web browser. So your group doesn’t even need to be in the same building, let alone the same country.
The Dashboard is group central and very interactive.
When you first log in to Composica, you’ll be logged on to your group or company Dashboard. Here you can see which other team members are logged in, your pending tasks, your available projects, recently edited documents, internal blog posts and comments, system news, your personal notes, outside links associated with your projects, and a tag cloud so you can find your projects by description.
The Chat Interface is your friend.
To chat with a team member, just click on the chat icon which is the little picture of a person with the cartoon bubble in the toolbar or the status bar. This feature functions just like an instant messaging window in any other application. You can even have group chats. If important things were said during the chat, you can save it and it will be listed on the Dashboard so that you can reference it again later.
Blog those big ideas of your project then watch them get shot down in the comments.
That’s a given, of course some ideas are going to get shot down. But there will be lots of opportunity to write positive comments about great ideas too. It’s the heart of collaborative work. Once you pick which project you are working on in the Dashboard, you can add blog posts and comments to the group blog that can be read by the individuals on the team through the Dashboard.
The Task Manager allows you to manage the project without being online 24/7.
Tasks can be assigned to the project as a whole, or a document within the project. They can be sorted with tags and by team member. This allows the Developer to assign tasks and deadlines and point out specific work that needs to be done. Multiple tasks can be assigned to a document, so if there are multiple members working on the page, then there can be multiple task sheets. Team members can also comment on tasks to add more details and keep the group informed of their progress.
Teamwork is golden.
In the end, the team doesn’t need a phone, a fax, FedEx, a printer, and multiple computers within the same office, or even the same time zone, to get an eLearning project completed.
