Advices for downloading and deploying AKWS

Please consider the following advices before you start downloading and deploying the ACTIVE Knowledge workspace in your environment.

1. Hardware: although you can deploy the entire workspace on a single Windows XP system with at least 2GB of RAM it is advisable to deploy the server components on a separate system, especially when you would like to experiment with more than one user.
2. Software prerequisites: please read carefully the server and client readme files for the required software and the required versions. Only Windows XP is supported for Workspace client and Windows XP and Windows 2003 is supported for the Workspace server components.
   Note that the initial server setup is quite time consuming because it has not been automated.
   On the other hand, Client setup is fully automated.
   Please NOTE that you need Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer on your client systems to explore all Workspace features. OpenOffice and Firefox  are not  supported.
3. MS Office documents: you should be aware that once you have installed the ACTIVE client package on your computer, your Office tools will be extended with ACTIVE workspace-specific add-ins and your Office documents which will be processed in scope of the ACTIVE workspace will be expanded with some hidden meta-data like tags and context names. This hidden information will remain in the documents even after you disable or de-install ACTIVE workspace Office add-ins, but they will not affect your normal operation.
4. Usage experience for Office tools and IE: ACTIVE workspace add-ins extend the primarily stand-alone operation of Office tools with network-based operations. Therefore the response time for certain newly created operations in Office tools (like program startup, tagging or workspace search) will be slightly delayed and will depend on the speed of your intranet and Workspace server. Note also that ACTIVE workspace features will not be operational in Office add-ins when the ACTIVE workspace server is not accessible from the workstation.
5. User data and activities: you should know that in certain configurations with a dedicated ACTIVE workspace server and separate ACTIVE clients on different workstations, the content of Office documents and emails will be automatically transmitted to the ACTIVE server system for the necessary data mining. Also user activities, like program startup will be monitored and stored on the ACTIVE server for activity mining  purposes.