Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Mohamed Farid
“Enterprise collaborative platform” has been developed in order to support collaborative activities
between individuals among <strong>the</strong> organisation. The platform supports <strong>the</strong> creation <strong>of</strong> a “virtual
community”, tackling <strong>the</strong> KM <strong>the</strong>ories <strong>of</strong> “Community <strong>of</strong> Practice” and “Community <strong>of</strong> Interest”, in
addition to presenting <strong>the</strong> business unit inside <strong>the</strong> physical hierarchy <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> organisation, i.e.
departments, sectors, divisions and teamwork.
Each virtual community is identified by one <strong>of</strong> three types, open, closed or restricted community, and
each type declares its access roles. Open community allows for any o<strong>the</strong>r platform’s users to join <strong>the</strong>
community without any previous permission from <strong>the</strong> admin or creator <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> community, while
restricted one allows o<strong>the</strong>rs to join through requesting an online membership permission. The closed
community is a fixed group <strong>of</strong> members determined by <strong>the</strong> creator or <strong>the</strong> admin <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> community,
even o<strong>the</strong>r users cannot request membership, and <strong>the</strong> community cannot even be searchable or
visible to o<strong>the</strong>r users. Screenshot to communities’ directory in MyIDSC is shown in figure 10.
In addition to <strong>the</strong> fact that <strong>the</strong> community represents a group <strong>of</strong> members, <strong>the</strong> platform by default also
allows <strong>the</strong> user <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> system to have his/her own private workspace, i.e. “My Community”, to manage
his/her own works, documents, events, etc.
The “virtual community” enables its member to share various types <strong>of</strong> documents and multimedia files
through a content management system (CMS) with support <strong>of</strong> versioning control, also <strong>the</strong>y are able to
organise events and outline <strong>the</strong>ir meetings through a shared calendar, and make discussion through
an internal discussion board. Even though, members <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> community are able to externalise <strong>the</strong>ir
knowledge to o<strong>the</strong>rs in forms <strong>of</strong> news, articles, documents and mini blogs. MyIDSC users also can
create <strong>the</strong>ir own blogs to capture <strong>the</strong>ir own ideas and experience and share with o<strong>the</strong>rs, getting <strong>the</strong>
ability to have feedback and comments from <strong>the</strong> community.
MyIDSC which is also based on an open source project, Liferay portal, supports internal search
capacities, and dynamic tagging enables its user to tag any knowledge content, i.e. web content or
document, leads to dynamically sharing <strong>of</strong> important or interesting content with <strong>the</strong> o<strong>the</strong>rs.
Figure 10: Screenshot to MyIDSC, directory <strong>of</strong> communities
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