What is the Colloquia System?
What do you need to use it?
How does it work?
What is special about Colloquia?
How are resources handled?
How much does it cost?
Can I publish activities on the web for people to join?
Can I read my normal email in Colloquia?
Can I make and publish web pages in Colloquia?
Can I import addresses and bookmarks from other systems?

Colloquia is a new kind of software system that supports group working.

What do you need to use it?

Every group member needs:

Colloquia installed on their machine

an E-mail Account

an Internet Connection

 

How does it work?

Anyone who wants to set up a group activity simply

Adds a folder for the activity

Drags and drops people into it from the People folder

Drags and drops resources into it from their Resource folder (web pages, documents etc.)

Defines a group task if required

Adds subactivities

Starts the activity with a single click

Sends the activity to all participants with a single click

All participants receive the Activity by

Opening the Colloquia Inbox

Getting new mail with a single click

Which automatically copies the new activity structure - people, resources, tasks and sub-activities into their copy of Colloquia.

Clicking on the activity name gives access to group conversations about this activity

Clicking on any person's name gives access to private one-to-one conversations about this topic

 

By always displaying messages within the context of an activity, you are always know what context you are talking about, and what you have discussed previously

Unlike other groupware systems, you don't need to set up a complex central server

Any user can set up a group activity. In fact they can set up sub-activities to an activity set up by someone else. Any activity is managed by the initiator, who decides who participates, what resources are used, and sets tasks.

 

Resources in Colloquia are a bit like bookmarks or favourites, except that you can describe them more fully, adding a description and private notes about them. They can be viewed using Colloquia's built in Web browser. Web pages can also be pulled down and saved offline in their entirety.

How much does it cost?

Colloquia is free for use within non-profit educational establishments - schools, colleges and universities. Training and education providers who charge for courses can negotiate a per seat license for each paying learner.

Training courses, consultancy and system extensions can also be provided, and will be charged at a daily rate.

Contact us to discuss your requirements

The current version does not allow activities to published on the web. It assumes you know who will be in your group, and relies on email to update them with new activities. We are planning a new release that will support publishing on the web and self registration on activities as an option.

Not yet, and maybe never. Colloquia messages are transported using normal email, but are actually attachments to blank email messages. This allows us to include the context from which the message was sent, that normal email messages cannot. We are considering providing a space for context free, "normal" email, but this may negate the new model for online conversations that Colloquia represents.

You can browse web pages from within Colloquia, using our built-in Browser or an external browser of your choice, and you can create resources from web pages which you may upload to a server via ftp, but we do not currently provide an HTML editor. But watch this space...

Can I import addresses and bookmarks from other systems?

The Colloquia team are working closely with the international IMS project to make the system compliant to its emerging specifications. This means that it will be able to exchange data with other IMS compliant systems, which are likely to be compatible with current ways of storing information on people and content. So soon we will be able to import these directly. In the meantime, we can import and export tab delimited text files containing information on resources and people.