The FileNet Team Collaboration Manager (TCM) application provides the framework and tools that team members can use to share information and participate in group decision-making. These tools include individual task tracking, discussion forums, live meetings, interactive polls, and document sharing.
The following sections provide general information about features available in the TCM application.
A teamspace represents the documents, tools, and processes used by a group of people who share a common goal, project, interest, or business process. Within a teamspace, members and guests can share information, discuss issues, track progress towards one or more goals, and communicate with each other.
Within a teamspace, you and other members can navigate easily between team discussions, meetings, related documents, tasks, and polls, and can access the information needed to collaborate effectively with each other. Elements within the teamspace can be linked to other items for ease of navigation. Using The Clipboard and lists of Related item links, members can include references to other objects. See Teamspaces for more information.
When you create a teamspace, you add the names of the people who will work together as members of the teamspace. Not all members will participate to the same extent within the teamspace. As you add people to the teamspace, you assign a "role" to them which determines what they are allowed to do within that teamspace. The administrator for your enterprise may create specialized user roles, but the TCM application provides the following roles as examples of team participants by default:
You can group the members of a teamspace into teams. This is especially useful if your teamspace has a large number of members. You might consider creating teams within the teamspace for different areas of functionality, or different phases of the project, identifying the key contact person as the team leader. For example, if members need contact information regarding a particular phase of the project, they can select the appropriate team, and view the team leader and team members in the Team Detail area.
See People and Teams for more information.
With TCM, you and other teamspace members can communicate with each other via discussions, polls and email, using the method that best suits the subject or the project phase.
Discussions are generally viewable by all members of the teamspace and are best suited to open-ended dialogs. You can start a discussion by posting a topic to a discussion forum, to which other users can post their responses. Discussions are particularly useful for activities such as soliciting feedback, as they allow lengthy responses. See Discussions for more information.
By using a poll, you can to ask other members a specific question and provide fixed response choices. TCM automatically tallies the responses. See Polls for more information.
Teamspace members can send email from within the TCM application while they are working with teamspace objects. Each TCM teamspace has a unique email address. Teamspace invitations (and the teamspace Overview page) include a vCard link you can use to add a teamspace email address to an email address book. See Email for more information.
When email is the best way for team members to communicate, you can include the teamspace email address as an addressee. This places a copy of the email into the teamspace where it is stored in the teamspace email archive. Email attachments are stored in the teamspace as FileNet P8 documents.
Within TCM, you can add, modify, and track tasks for yourself and others in the teamspace. A task can be divided into sub-tasks at any stage of the project, and sub-tasks can be assigned as appropriate. You can set optional task due dates and reminders to facilitate scheduling and tracking. See Tasks for more information.
Within TCM, you and other members can schedule online meetings through a third-party meeting vendor. When a TCM member creates a meeting, attendees receive an email notification with a link to the meeting. As a meeting creator, you can invite people who are not part of the teamspace (or even TCM users). Invitees can join the meeting either through the TCM application, or they can use the link embedded in the email notice.
The meeting notice includes a link to an iCalendar file to use to add the meeting to a scheduling program, such as Microsoft Outlook. See Meetings for more information.
As a teamspace member or guest you can choose the teamspace objects that are most important to your work, and subscribe to notifications about those objects. For example, you can choose to be notified whenever a document of interest is updated, or when documents are added to a folder of interest. Other notifications can include the completion of a task or an overdue completion date.
See Subscriptions for more information.
A large project can generate many documents, discussions, emails, and tasks. The TCM application provides filtering functions so that you can control how much information you see. Members can display all of the objects that relate to them (such as their tasks and meetings). Supervisors and managers can use different filters, as well as the Overview and Home tabs, to see a project-level view or summary of the project.
See Filtering lists for more information.
The TCM application allows you to link dissimilar objects for easy reference by other users. For example, as a discussion participant you can link a document to the discussion page, thereby making the document easily available to other participants.
See Related item links for more information.
Using TCM's Search features, you can find specific information, either within a teamspace, or across teamspaces. You can search for all objects related to specific keywords, or all objects (polls, for example) within a teamspace or within multiple teamspaces. See Searching for more information.
When a teamspace is no longer needed, a user with appropriate security permissions can deactivate the teamspace. When a teamspace is deactivated, the teamspace objects and documents are still available for viewing, but the teamspace cannot be updated. Documents contained in the teamspace can be checked out, but no one can add new documents to a deactivated teamspace.
A deactivated teamspace serves as an archive of the information used by the team to reach decisions and create deliverables.
NOTE The TCM application can be customized for your site. Because of this, the user interface that you see might be somewhat different from what is described in this help system. Your administrator might have removed some of the options documented here, added new options or features, or changed the general appearance. Consult your facility's documentation for additional information, if needed.