Caucus FAQ: What is Caucus? | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Screen Porch was founded in 1996 by an experienced team of software, networking, and organizational design professionals. Our proprietary technologies reflect the groups many decades of experience helping people work together using computers.
Out of aggregations of individuals, Screen Porch products
create effective groups. Out of information possessed by
individuals, Screen Porch products create shared knowledge.
Our software is accessed via a browser and can include and
integrate any other browser-accessible software.
Screen Porchs first product, Caucus,
is software for teamwork, group-learning, and community
activity. Caucus workspaces on the Web allow
people to work together at their convenience across
buildings, time-zones, or continents.
People work together in meetings and conversations in short, in discussions. When we talk about Caucus we are simply talking about the world's best discussion software, software which models the ways work actually gets done in real-world discussions.
Caucus creates persistant online workspaces
called conferences; they are available any time and offer
rich contexts for information-sharing. Caucus
workspaces are not dependent on marshalling resources and
people for a "realtime" session, yet they create
the sense that the team, learning community, committee, or
other group using the space is actually present whenever an
individual arrives to participate.
Caucus combines a feature-rich
computer-conferencing API, a workspace-scripting language
which is thoroughly HTML-compatible, and facilities to
capture and present literally any kind of information in the
workspace. Caucus workspaces can be tailored to
meet any need people have to work together.
Visually, Caucus workspaces can take on any Web-compatible form. Caucus pages can be redesigned as easily as any other Web page. Workspace visual identity can easily be made to reflect and extend corporate identity, and a visual identity can be tailored for the applications participants and purpose.
The templates included with Caucus offer immediate productivity, automatically installing an organizational workspace center. But, Caucus also includes facilities to develop custom discussion-centered applications, using CML (Caucus Markup Language), our HTML-compatible scripting language. These Caucus applications can extend from a single Caucus Discussion Objecttm to a full-blown enterprise-wide conference center.
Caucus workspaces may include any specialized capability (presentation, multimedia, database, etc.) a customer requires. Not just Web information but any browser-accessible application literally anything which can appear on a Web page can be included seamlessly in the discussion.
Workspace resources may include files and documents from users PCs, applets, diagrams, video, database applications, links to other resources, a Chat room, etc. These resources simply become material parts of the discussion sources people draw on and information they use to create knowledge while working together.
Visual customization, programmability, and the power to
integrate any Web information or application are the keys to
the extraordinarily rich contexts for work created by Caucus.
Yet, Caucus is also easy to afford, simple to
integrate, and offers immediate benefits. It adds no
infrastructure and no new software to learn. And Caucus
is compatible with all Web security methods. If an
organizations intranet or Internet sites implement
security methods that work in a Web environment, they will
work with Caucus.
Screen Porch has developed Caucus to
address three core needs of organizations:
Learning: Screen Porch focuses on distance-learning in the education market as well as applications for corporate-university and corporate-training markets. Caucus is used by numerous colleges, universities and other educational institutions around the world to create virtual campuses.
Teamwork: Screen Porch aims Caucus at Fortune 1000 and government organizations that need support for distributed, virtual teams. Caucus has been chosen for these kinds of applications by some of the largest government and commercial entities in the world.
Community: Caucus is used to support virtual communities around the world. Increasingly, it is being used to create organizational communities of skill and practice intranet/extranets in support of enterprises and products/services.
On a longer view, virtually every Web site will benefit
when its constituencies can create and share knowledge and
community at the site, rather than simply viewing interactive
billboards or querying static information. Every Web site is
a Caucus conversation waiting to happen.
Caucus features the affordability, ease
of use, simplicity of deployment and low training cost
associated with a browser-based environment. Software
maintenance is of a single server application only.
Caucus can be installed and a full conference center created in a single day, allowing an organization to begin to recapture quickly the cost not only of the software but of much of their Web infrastructure. Moreover, the business benefits of Caucus are available immediately upon creation of conferences.
Caucus offers exceptionally rich
functionality for creating and sharing information, building
team and group unity and effectiveness, and turning
information in organizational knowledge. Along with increased
productivity and accuracy through shortened
information-sharing cycles, some key benefits of Caucus
include enhanced collaboration, a heightened sense of team
and enterprise participation, and the opportunity to create
branded constituencies and communities.
Caucus runs on Microsoft NT 4.0 (Intel) and a wide variety of
Unix servers, on an intranet or the Internet. See below:
AIX 4.1 (IBM RS/6000 series) | IRIX 5.3 (Silicon Graphics) | |
BSDI 3.0 (Intel) | Linux 1.2.13 (Intel) | |
DEC UNIX OSF/1 4.0 (Alpha) | Solaris 2.4 (Sun) | |
HP-UX A.09.04 | SunOS 4.1 (Sun) |
Caucus software is installed on a standard Web
server. It includes the Caucus server and
database, the HTML-compatible interpreted language CML (Caucus
Markup Language), and Caucus workspace
templates.
The Webmaster, network administrator, or systems operator
who manages your Web server should install and configure Caucus.
It may be managed by your Webmaster. Users throughout your
organization will be able to organize and administer Caucus
workspaces.
Any HTML developer, using any HTML tools, can create custom
designs for Caucus and Caucus
workspaces and can also integrate any HTML software (viz.
video, audio, chat services, etc.) into your Caucus
environment. Anyone with experience in programming concepts
and logic including people who have used Perl, Visual
Basic, or any other scripting or programming language
will find CML easy to use to create a wide variety of
discussion-based applications.
Despite increased Web services and browser accessibility,
Notes is a soup-to-nuts integrated environment based on
proprietary network protocols, servers and client software.
Notes requires an organization to "bet the company"
on the software.
Caucus is an incremental application on an intranet, extranet, or Internet Web-server. Caucus workspaces can include literally anything that can appear on a Web page including any Notes application that can be accessed from a Web browser, or any other browser-accessible database application. It is designed to interoperate smoothly with all other Web-compatible software. These and other resources are transformed by being brought into the Caucus context.
Caucus is also much easier to install,
configure and maintain than Notes, and it is much less
expensive than Notes.
Its a matter of architecture, and even more of a design
philosophy.
The Web is a rapidly developing environment, a world in which creative people of high intelligence introduce new tools and technologies regularly, presenting important opportunities for organizations to gain productivity and effectiveness by continuing to enhance their intranets and Internet sites. This kind of power and flexibility will simply never be available from within "soup-to-nuts" integrated systems.
Hence, we designed Caucus not as a closed system or "integrated" package, but rather as a high-performance application for discussion-centered workspaces that can include and integrate any Web-standard software software that exists now and software to come. We also gave Caucus a powerful application-development scripting system to allow customers to extend their workspace applications.
Caucus is, and will continue to be,
compatible with and friendly to new Web technologies as they
are developed. Caucus allows an organization to
gain advantage by integrating these new tools and
technologies in discussion-centered environments where
information can be created and shared. Caucus
is also compatible with any kind of intranet or other
Web-compatible security technologies or measures.
In BBS, newsgroup, or threaded forum software, the individual
message not the meeting, discussion, project or team
is the most significant object. This software relies
on a metaphor taken from a real-world bulletin board, as the
name implies. The metaphor is of an individual posting a
message in order to receive a reply from another individual.
Essentially such software creates a database of individual messages. As with any other database, the goal is either to quickly retrieve information and remove it from context or to quickly add specific information to the database. When a user selects a message, the screen blanks and is taken over by that individual message.
There is no context, no persistent sense of place, and no room to structure an application. It would not be easy, for example, to support a strategic team or create an online training course in a BBS. Such software provides no foundation for creating discussion-centered workspaces or applications to support teamwork, learning groups, or organizational communities.
Moreover, because these products rely on the basic metaphor of thumbtacking a query to a bulletin board in hope of an individual reply, they all rely on threading and subthreading as a way to organize their message databases. The goal is to create a way to match reply to query individually.
Threading and subthreading are antithetical to the creation of a team and team knowledge. Instead of focusing contributions to add to a rich shared space, they disperse replies in multiplying threads which get thinner and thinner.
Caucus has been designed based on decades of
experience in discussion-centered application development. Caucus
workspaces are rich networks of people, resources,
applications, interests, identities, databases, and
multimedia information all designed to support and
enhance group commitment and achievement.
Caucus has been designed to allow an organization to
build custom discussion-based applications. Any such set of
workspaces can have its own look, feel, and custom-designed
interface. No Web conferencing product allows this kind of
advanced customization or application development.
Particular Caucus discussions and
even items within these discussions can be attached as
objects to anything whatever on a Web page, referenced as
normal URLs. No Web conferencing product was conceived with
this immensely useful facility in mind.
Collabra essentially offers an interface to NNTP servers, an
outdated technology which implements BBSes on the Internet.
Moreover Collabra requires that an organization use
Netscapes server products and a Netscape browser
environment. Like Lotus Notes, it locks an organization into
a proprietary and single-branded server choice, even though
other Web server software may offer benefits in price,
performance, or flexibility. Caucus will work
well with Netscape Web servers and browsers, but will also
work equally well with any other Web server. Unlike Collabra,
Caucus is also browser-independent.
Caucus is available in a version for Microsoft NT. Caucus
is 100%-compatible with Microsofts Web development
standards and tools, including ActiveX. These facilities can
only enhance the kinds of functionality available within Caucus
workspaces.
Caucus applications are compatible with Java-driven
Web pages, and Java applets can be included in Caucus
discussions and even in users responses if a site
wishes to allow this inclusion. Web development tools,
whether for publishing, database access or other programming
purposes, do not provide facilities for creating rich
discussion-centered workspaces. They offer complementary
functionality, rather than competition, for Caucus.
Yes, they are already doing so. We will be happy to share
solutions stories with interested people.
Caucus is sold through direct sales, via
the Internet, and through VARs and consultants/developers.
Caucus is currently available. A 30-day trial version
of Caucus is available for download from Screen
Porch's public Web site at
http://screenporch.com.
Product information and a demonstration Caucus
workspace are also at the Web site.
Caucus will continue to be enhanced. A new version of
Caucus will be released by early 1998. New
CML templates and sample applications are often available in
our technical support conferences, created either by us or by
Caucus developers worldwide.
For more information, visit our Web site at http://screenporch.com,
send email to the Screen Porch sales department at sales@screenporch.com,
or call Screen Porch sales at 703-243-3001.