Replacing an existing platform with many features is a difficult task. In order to tackle the complexity of such a project, the implementation of the new Collaboratory is done with an iterative approach.
Features have been divided into 4 releases, each focused on a specific scope to bring features as soon as possible to the community:
- The Coordination release is focused on creating the core ecosystem of tools and integrating them together to help coordinators of the project
- The Platform release brings the essential tools for HBP platforms to integrate their services and applications and collaborate with external users
- The Scientific release is bringing JupyterLab to the community and, with it, a more user friendly environment for scientific collaboration
- The MOOC release creates the ground for clients to consume APIs and therefore enables the automation of online courses
Here is a summary of the features that will be brought to the community:
| Feature | Collaboratory v1 | Collaboratory v2 Coordination release | Collaboratory v2 Platform release | Collaboratory v2 Scientific release | Collaboratory v2 MOOC release |
| Create collabs | ✅ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Manage collab team | ✅ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Write wiki content | ✅ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Collaborative edition | ✅ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Public collabs (without authentication) | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Full text search | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Group based permissions | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Viewer / editor /admin roles | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Microsoft document live edition | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| User registration | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| User managed groups | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| External application integration | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Forum | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Software Catalogue | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Jupyter notebooks | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ |
| JupyterLab | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ |
| POSIX access to Drive in notebooks | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ |
| Python requirement management | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ |
| Notebook versioning | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✔️ |
| Collab API | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Team API | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Drive API | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Cloning collabs | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |