Content area
Full Text
FirstClass, with a reported 5 million subscribers, comes in fourth place in the box office behind the power trilogy, an enviable market position. What is the secret to its success? We think it's the collaboration toolset, which includes conferencing and chats.
Conferences are discussion groups akin to bulletin board systems or newsgroups that focus on one topic, such as employee benefits or virus alerts. The user posts messages or files to the conference and can follow threaded topics within. The administrator can set up public conferences (accessible by all users) and private conferences (accessible by individual users or groups with the proper privileges). These permission sets may permit browsing the contents of the conference, sending messages to it, approving messages before they are placed in the conference, moderating a conference, or completely controlling the conference including editing messages before they are posted. With permission, users also can create their own conferences, which then function like shared folders on other systems. FirstClass supports nested conferences, which let us navigate through the folders or place an alias on the desktop to go straight to the requested folder. We were able to replicate conferences across all servers or just selected ones. Public conferences may soon get completely out of hand without some topic, naming and replication controls. Administrators should delegate authority to create and manage public conferences sparingly. FirstClass conferences support a maximum of 1,700 messages-the administrator can set a limit on the size of the messages in the conference.
FirstClass includes public and private chats, which are real-time discussions with logged-in users. Chats appear as icons within folders or conferences, labeled as to topic. To have chats, we needed the proper permissions; we also could choose to decline chat invitations. When we actively used a chat, a...