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Coordination release - HBP Wiki

IAM21 instance, do not create collab nor modify a team, your changes will be lost


Coordination release

Last modified by hbpadmin on 2023/05/15 15:16

The Coordination Release is the first step in the redesign of the Collaboratory.

It has several goals:

  • bringing together the tools that form its core, cristallising a vision into a base infrastructure for future improvements
  • providing a set of features which can improve coordination workflows within the Human Brain Project
  1. Features
    1. Organise your work with collabs
    2. Collaborate with teams
    3. Document your work with your own wiki
    4. Manage your files with the Collaboratory drive
    5. Edit documents collaboratively
  2. Use cases
    1. Personal private documentation
    2. HBP centric communication
    3. Public communication
    4. Collaborative reporting
  3. Limitations
    1. Browser compatibility
    2. Collaborating with users outside of the Human Brain Project consortium
    3. Accessing the new Collaboratory with your HBP account

Features

Organise your work with collabs

A collab is a collaborative project, with a clear scope. It contains a wiki, a document repository and has its own team that you manage. You decide if your collab is private and only your team can see it or if it is public and anyone can access it.

Collaborate with teams

You decide who belongs to your team and their access rights using these 3 roles:

  • viewers have read only permission on your collab content
  • editors can contribute to your wiki and documents
  • admins can edit your collab settings, manage its team and even delete it

You can use existing units of the Human Brain Project to share your collab with hundreds of people in a simple click.

See the dedicated page for more information

Document your work with your own wiki

A collab is organised around its own wiki.

Unlike most wikis you are used to, like Wikipedia, your collab wiki has a tree structure which makes it natural to organise it like folders containing documents.

The Collaboratory uses XWiki to manage its wikis, an Open Source tool which brings you state-of-art wiki features, such as a complete history of the changes on your wiki documents, WYSIWYG editors to help you design your documents intuitively and much more!

Check the XWiki user guide to learn more.

Manage your files with the Collaboratory drive

Each collab comes with its own file repository which we call the Collaboratory drive. Its permissions are synchronised with your team's roles, making it easy for you to share documents.

The Collaboratory drive uses Seafile, an Open Source solution, to bring you the best user experience: drag'n drop to upload files, downloading entire folders, file revisions, and even a desktop client to synchronise your collab documents to your computer!

See Seafile's documentation to learn more.

Download a desktop client.

Edit documents collaboratively

From your collab drive, click on a document, spreadsheet or presentation and start editing it directly in your browser!

OnlyOffice, the Open Source solution behind the scene, also supports collaborative edition: you can now open a document with your teammates and start working together instantly.

See OnlyOffice documentation to learn more.

Use cases

With the set of features brought by the Coordination release, many use cases can be fulfilled today:

Personal private documentation

The Collaboratory combines the intuitivity of a document repository with online editing capabilities and the structural power of a wiki linking pages together, all within the comfort of your preferred browser.

You can create your own private collab to manage your work:

  • organise your documentation in the wiki, using the navigation tree and the search engine to find your information
  • upload and edit the documents that are valuable to your work in the drive
  • access this convenient environment from your own laptop at home, your personal computer at work or even your mobile in the public transport

HBP centric communication

You want to communicate with part to all off the HBP members? You can:

  • create a private collab
  • add hbp/SGA2 if you want to share with all HBP members or hbp/SGA2/SPXX for a specific sub project
  • create the documentation in the wiki or add the documents you want to share in your drive

You now have a privileged channel with tens or hundreds of users in just a few clicks.

Public communication

Collabs can be a productive tool to structure information for a public event such as a workshop:

  • create a private collab
  • structure the information about your event in the wiki: add information about the location, the agenda and how to participate
  • if you need to share documents, add them in the drive and create public links that you can add in your wiki pages
  • when you are happy with your event mini website, edit your collab and set it to public

You can now freely share the link to your collab and create a news of a tweet that links to it: your audience will not need to have a user account to access it.

During your event, you can modify the provided information to your audience without relying on an external communication team.

Collaborative reporting

Being responsible of a sub project, work package or a task implies regular reporting in collaboration with many individuals across the project.

A collab can be a convenient way to work collaboratively on such reporting:

  • create a private collab
  • add people you need to collaborate with as editors in your collab team
  • upload or copy an existing template for your report in your collab drive
  • open it and start doing your reporting directly in your browser
  • when finished, you can change your collaborators permission to viewer so they cannot edit your report anymore

You can now easily download and send your report by email or even share it with a link.

Limitations

Browser compatibility

Testing and support is done on Chrome and Firefox, latest version. There is a good chance you would have a good experience on any modern browser.

Collaborating with users outside of the Human Brain Project consortium

Collaborating with external users is an important goal of the Collaboratory. It is not possible to register external users currently but it is planned for the next major release.

See the planned releases for more details.

Accessing the new Collaboratory with your HBP account

The new Collaboratory introduces a new Identity and Access Management (IAM v2) tool: KeyCloak.

User accounts with an SGA2 accreditation are synchronised every night from the previous IAM system (IAM v1).

The synchronisation does not copy your password, implying that you need to use the reset password feature in the IAM v2 system to gain access to it.

New comers need to go through several steps to gain access to Collaboratory v2:

  1. Request an invitation from Collaboratory v1
  2. When access is granted, create your account in Collaboratory v1
  3. Request an accreditation
  4. Once your accreditation is accepted by your sub project manager, your account will be synchronised to IAM v2 during the night
  5. Navigate to Collaboratory v2 and try to log in
  6. Use the "Forgot Password?" of the login form to set your IAM v2 password
  7. You can now access both Collaboratory v1 and v2 through their respective IAM services