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ACTIVE knowledge workspace (AKWS)

The ACTIVE knowledge workspace (AKWS) integrates a number of software components, developed in the ACTIVE project. In order to give interested researchers a possibility to get a hands-on experience with our ongoing development we are making it available for download for non-commercial use. Note that we are publishing a snapshot of our ongoing work, therefore some components currently provide only very limited functionality and will mature as the project evolves.

The ACTIVE knowledge workspace forms an integrated software environment, consisting of:

  • ACTIVated applications
  • ACTIVE Web Portal
  • ACTIVE Taskbar desktop client
  • Workspace services

ACTIVated Applications are application programs which are extended with Workspace-specific features. Currently the following applications have been ACTIVated: MS Office 2007 Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Internet Explorer.

The ACTIVE Web portal and the ACTIVE Taskbar allow the users to interact with the Workspace, e.g. to manually create and switch between different contexts. ACTIVE workspace services are providing the workspace functionallity.

The following figure outlines the basic Workspace structure:

Once the ACTIVE server package is installed on the ACTIVE server in your intranet and the ACTIVE client package is installed on each workstation that will be included in your trial, your MS Office tools are turned into a powerful Enterprise 2.0 collaborative system. Together with the ACTIVE web portal and ACTIVE Taskbar they allow you to work with information such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Outlook emails and Internet explorer URLs in a Web 2.0 way.

You are able to tag such information objects, to ask for tag recommendations to classify them better, to associate them with your working context and to describe them with other metadata which is shared among collaborators as needed. You can search  for them on the basis of much richer conditions than pure text and document type as is possible by MS Desktop Search. The workspace search allows you to query for your documents, emails and URLs by tags, by the working context, by the creator of their metadata and by a number of additional metadata attributes, like subject or title and description.

You are able to form ad-hoc teams to accomplish particular assignments and make information sharing and communication between them much easier than with the basic Office suite. In the Workspace it is possible to define tasks and contexts which help you cope with unstructured processes in the enterprise.

In addition, the context mining service,  which is part of the Workspace, will monitor your Office tools activities and will discover what your working contexts are and will detect in which context you are working. 

 In order to experiment with the ACTIVE knowledge workspace you need to

  • Agree to the license
  • Register for software download
  • Install the ACTIVE server package in your intranet
  • Install the client package to trial workstations
  • Go through the typical usage scenarios which are described in the readme files of the respective packages.