VBCS's universe is dubbed Group Memory. Users collaborate in shared communities or workspaces that make the best use of e-mail of any product in our roundup. VBCS uses e-mail for notifications, but also lets groups, folders and discussion lists receive e-mail and process attachments as documents. There's no need to set up mailboxes on your default mail server--VBCS includes a mailer.
We created communities easily using built-in templates with default feature sets. The templates weren't as extensive as Forum's, but they included account, content, project, topic and custom community spaces. The names are indicative of their functions--an account community space is designed with contacts and lists to manage accounts. We focused on content communities to manage documents and contents. A wizard guided the way.
After adding a title and description to the community, we designated it "public" so all users could access and read content. A "private" designation required populating an ACL (access control list) with users, groups or roles to access it. Then we fixed a group e-mail address for the community and imported documents through the Web interface in singular fashion.
Like the products from Microsoft, Open Text and Stellent, VBCS supports WebDAV. With it, users can create, manage and edit documents online. VBCS also allows FTP access to any resources in Group Memory. Although VBCS doesn't include a graphical interface to configure workflow tasks, the process is painless and easy to set up.
The wizard also provides a window to designate users as approvers using a fully automated approval-routing feature that lets you list users in order of approval hierarchy. Sweet. Finally, the wizard launched a "mail to" form, sending the workspace's URL to invite participants. Otherwise, we could have subscribed users to the workspace.
