Pages and Discussions

When we started work on activeCollab 1.0 one of the top priority tasks was to improve messages. They were one of the most important elements in the system. You used them for discussion, document writing, note taking, and who knows what else... Based on your feedback and our brainstorming we wanted to cover following things:

1. The new system should support a collaborative writing process
2. Users should be able to organize content and discussions even on large projects
3. Make tracking of content production and discussions easy

We also realized that all this couldn't be accomplished with a single tool. We decided to draw the line between discussions and content production. The old messages module was split into two more focused modules.

If you ever used a forum / bulletin board online, you'll know how to use discussions. Every project has a section where people can create new topics or reply to existing ones. Recently created and updated discussions are listed on the main screen. You can browse the archive by time of last activity or by category.

You can subscribe to topics, as well as receive an email notification every time someone posts a new reply. Notification emails contain the full text of the comment so you can track the discussion from your favorite email client.

Pages are a new concept in activeCollab 1.0 . Designed to replace old messages module, they provide some additional content production oriented features. A page is a document with a title and body that people write and discuss. There are three important new features that the old messages module didn't support

1. activeCollab 1.0 tracks revisions so you can see how the document evolved through time.
2. Every page can have unlimited sub pages. These sub pages can have their own sub ages and so on. Organize your pages like you would organize chapters in a book and work on them one step at a time. This makes work on complex documents like product documentation or even a book easy to manage.
3. Tasks can be attached to a page.

People can subscribe to pages and get email notification every time somebody posts a new revision or comment. The new content or comment on the given page is included in the notification. This is great because you can keep an eye on a specific page from your favorite email client and log into activeCollab only if you have something to comment or add.