The Collaboration section

• Applies to: All Board Cloud subscriptions

WHAT: Introduction to Board's Collaboration services

Board's collaboration services are powerful tools capable of redefining productivity within an organization: they allow users to connect, share, and work together in Board.

Board's collaboration services add unique, in context communication capabilities to analytical applications and business models.

They introduce a collaborative approach by allowing users to publish news, post feeds, open discussion threads embedded in Screens and Capsules, or to create chat sessions between members of the same user group.

Board's collaboration services include the following:

• Feed. This feature allows user with appropriate authorizations to publish news and other content visible to specific user groups in a Board Platform. Authors can include an image, attach a file and share links to Board resources (Capsules and/or Screens).
  Learn more about the Feed feature.

• Discussions. This feature allows users to start discussion threads inside Capsules and Screens. Users can then reply to existing threads or start a new one. Discussions can include a file attachment and a user's custom filters for the currently open Screen, so that other users can restore the exact Screen view as when it was shared.
  Learn more about The Discussions feature.

• Chat. This feature allows users to start chatting with one or multiple users. It's is also possible to share files and links to specific Screens with one user's custom filters applied (i.e. by clicking on the link, the recipient(s) will access the Screen with the exact same configuration as when it was shared).
  Learn more about the Chat feature.

In the Collaboration section of the Subscription Hub, you can enable and configure Board's collaboration services. You can also manage access to these services by creating user groups.

Learn more about Board's collaboration services.

WHAT: The Collaboration home page

In the upper part of the Collaboration home page, you can activate Board's Collaboration services, review their status, and enable or disable Collaboration features separately. See next paragraph for more details.

The status of Board's Collaboration services is displayed under the "STATUS" label and under the Collaboration icon in the upper left corner of the page; the red "X" indicates that they're disabled, while the green check mark indicates that they're enabled.

The rest of the page is dedicated to user groups, displayed in a table; from there, you can create new groups and edit or delete existing ones. See Create, edit, or delete a user group for more details

In the user groups table, you can see all existing user groups and their main information: the table is sortable and searchable using the interactive header fields.

By default, you can view:

• The group name

• The group description

• The features activated on each group

• The number of members in each group

The "All Users" group is a default group that includes all active Board users in the Subscription Hub. It cannot be deleted, and its name and description can't be changed. See About user groups and News author for more details.

HOW: Enabling and disabling Board's Collaboration services

All Collaboration features can be enabled or disabled at different levels of granularity, as shown in the following picture:

Level 1: Global configuration

Administrators can enable and disable Board's Collaboration services on all Platforms at once, by clicking the "ENABLE"/"DISABLE" button in upper right corner of the page.

Collaboration services are disabled by default. If Collaboration services are disabled, configurations applied on level 2 and 3 are retained but ignored. All Collaboration-related interface elements and features will not be visible within all Board Platforms associated with the Subscription Hub.

Level 2: Enable/Disable some Collaboration features

You can also enable only some of the Collaboration features on all Platforms. To do so, proceed as follows:

1. If Board's Collaboration services are disabled, click the "ENABLE" button in upper right corner of the page. The "STATUS" label and the Collaboration icon in the upper left corner of the page will immediately reflect the status change.

2. Tick the checkbox next to the feature(s) you want to enable. The selected features will be immediately available in all Platforms associated with the Subscription Hub.

   Depending on the configuration of user groups, some features may not be available for certain users. See About user groups for more details.

For these settings to take effect, Collaboration services must be enabled globally (Level 1). If a feature is disabled at this level, it won't be available on all Platforms, regardless user groups configurations (Level 3). When a feature is disabled, all existing chat sessions, published contents and discussions are saved. They will become accessible once the corresponding feature is enabled again.

Level 3: User Groups

Finally, access to the chat and feed features can be managed at the user group level. This is the most granular level of configuration for those two features.

To enable or disable the feed or chat feature for a single group, please refer to the Create, edit, or delete a user group page.

The Discussions feature works at the Platform level and cannot be managed at the user group level. See The Discussions feature for more details.

If the chat and feed features are disabled (Level 2), configurations applied to user groups are retained but ignored. In this case, the feed and chat features will not be visible in all Board Platforms associated with the Subscription Hub.

When the features are disabled, all existing chat sessions and published contents are saved. They will become accessible once the corresponding feature is enabled again.