6 Working Within a Group Space

6.1 Step 1: Log On

To log on as Zeba:

1. Click the Login link in the Banner area.

2. Enter the user ID Zeba.

3. Enter the password welcome1.

4. Click OK.

When you log on, you notice on your personal space Welcome page (in the Worklist pane) that you've been added as a member of the Tony Notebook Sales group space. You also notice the Sales page has been added your personal space; because you are a member of the Sales team, this page was automatically pushed to you when the WebCenter Spaces administrator assigned it to the Sales role.

The first thing you want to do is take a look at the group space and become familiar with what Monica's gathered already.

6.2 Step 2: Locate the Group Space

1. In the Worklist pane, click the notification that says you have been added to the Tony Notebook Sales group space.

2. Click Acknowledge to confirm your membership.

   The Tony Notebook Sales group space opens.

   Once you've acknowledged your membership, the notice disappears from your Worklist pane. How can you get to the group space in the future? WebCenter Spaces makes it easy for you to access the group spaces you use most often.

3. In the Banner, click Group Spaces.

   Below the blue line, all the group spaces you can access (or have accessed recently) are listed, up to ten:

   Figure 6-1 Accessing Group Spaces

   
   

   This is a handy way to access your frequently used group spaces, but what if you belong to more than ten group spaces? Or what if you want to see what other group spaces are available in case you might want to request membership?

4. While the Group Spaces drop-down is displayed, click My Group Spaces.

   Figure 6-2 My Group Spaces

   
   

   Perhaps the most important thing about this tab is the Filter field. Right now it's displaying all the group spaces you belong to, which, at this point, is only Tony Notebook Sales. But by changing the value in this field, you can see all the group spaces you might want to join. Take a moment now to see how this tab allows you to see all public group spaces (which means anyone can see them, even people without a WebCenter Spaces log in), all discoverable group spaces (which means you might be able to request membership), and so on. There aren't many group spaces available now, of course, but you can easily see how My Group Spaces is an invaluable tool for making sure you have access to all the group spaces you need.

6.3 Step 3: Adding Documents to the Group Space

Let's get back to the problem with Tony Notebooks. The first thing you need to do is present the evidence backing up your claim that there's something wrong with Tony Notebook sales. You have two charts that will help you do this: BIchart1.jpg and BIchart2.jpg. These will help acclimate other group space members to the trends you've noticed and get them thinking about where the problem may lie.

1. In Tony Notebook Sales, click Documents.

   The Documents page you are now viewing displays (or will display) all documents that pertain to the Tony Notebook problem. The Documents page in your personal space, by contrast, lists documents that you have explicitly uploaded to your personal library. And you may have noticed that your Sidebar also contains a Documents pane; that pane lists all the documents you have recently accessed, regardless of where those documents reside.

2. Click Upload.

   Use the Browse button to navigate to BIchart1.jpg. This chart should be on the server identified by your WebCenter administrator.

3. Click Upload in the far right of the Upload Document screen.

   Figure 6-3 Uploading BIchart1.jpg

   
   

4. Repeat this process to upload BIchart2.jpg.

   When you're finished, the Documents page should look something like this:

   Figure 6-4 Charts Uploaded to the Group Space

   
   

5. Click BIchart1.jpg to display it.

   The chart opens in another browser window.

6. Return to WebCenter Spaces and click BIchart2.jpg to display it.

Yes, both charts should help illustrate the problem so that the other group space members can see it clearly.

6.4 Step 4: Create a List

You've done some research on the Tony Notebook problem by collaborating with the Customer Support department. Specifically, you've asked them to gather information on the top questions submitted by customers concerning the Tony Notebook laptop through customer discussion forums, call logs, and trade shows. You're now ready report your findings to the other group space members, so you decide to create a list. A list is just one of the ways you can organize and present information in WebCenter Spaces.

1. In the Tony Notebook Sales group space, click Lists.

   On the Lists page, the far left panel displays all the current lists (Project Issues is created by default for each project group space). When you select a list, its content displays in the right-hand panel.

2. In the Lists panel, click Create a new list, as shown in Figure 6-5:

   Figure 6-5 Create List Icon

   
   

3. In the Name field, type Customer Questions.

4. Leave the Description field blank.

5. Click the arrow in the Template pull-down to display the options available.

   There are four different types of lists to choose from. Although three of the lists contain pre-populated columns, you can always change the names of those columns if you wish.

   Table 6-1 Types of Lists

   List Type	Description
   Custom List	Enables you to create your own columns.
   Issues	Contains four columns: Subject, Assigned To, Closed, and Comments. An Issues list (called Project Issues) appears on each group project's Home page by default, including Tony Notebook Sales.
   Milestones	Contains three columns: Date, Description, and Status.
   Objectives	A simple list, appropriate in many different situations. Contains just two columns: Title and Description.

   
   

6. You want to create your own columns, so select Custom List.

7. Click OK.

   Your screen should now look like this:

   Figure 6-6 Creating a Custom List

   
   

   You want your list to have four columns to relate the following information: row number (number), customer's question (string), how many customers asked this question (number), and whether the question was one of the top five questions asked in the previous quarter (Boolean).

   Let's create the first column now.

8. In the Columns panel, make sure Customer Questions is highlighted, then click Edit list:

   Figure 6-7 Adding a Column to a List

   
   

9. Under Columns, click Create:

   Figure 6-8 Creating a Column

   
   

10. To create the first column, the number of the row, fill in the values as shown in Figure 6-9:

    Figure 6-9 Creating the Number Column

    
    

11. Click OK.

    On the left side, you can see that the first column, Number, has been added.

12. Follow steps 8-10 for the remaining three columns, using the column names and data types shown in Table 6-2:

    Table 6-2 Columns to Add to the List

    Column Name	Data Type
    Customer Question	String
    Frequency	Number
    Top 5?	Boolean

    
    

13. When you've finished adding all the columns, click Close in the upper right corner.

14. The final order of the columns should look like this:

    Figure 6-10 Final Column Order

    
    

    For the purposes of this scenario, we're not going to populate this list with all the customer questions. We'll just add one of the top five, to give you an idea of how list data is supplied.

15. To add the first row, click Edit:

    Figure 6-11 Editing a List

    
    

16. Click Add to add a row.

    Four fields appear in which you can enter data, one field for each column in the list.

17. Enter some dummy data in the fields as follows:

    • Number: 1

    • Customer Question: How does this warranty compare to the warranty for Snazzy brand's XOP model?

    • Frequency: 2

    • Top 5?: check

18. Click Save.

    Your screen should now look like this:

    Figure 6-12 First Row Added to the List

    
    

    You may have noticed the last column in your list (after Top 5?), the Links column. Links give you the ability to associate a question with a particular document. We'll experiment with links later, in Chapter 8, "Helping Others Find Your Content".

6.5 Step 5: Drop the List on a Page

Although all group space members can see this list by going to the Lists page, you want to give it even more visibility by placing it on a page within the group space. You decide to create a page called Data to contain this list, as well as other relevant data you might collect.

1. Click Page Actions->Create Page.

   Because you're still in Tony Notebook Sales, the page will be created as part of that group space.

2. In the Name field, type Data.

3. Leave the Scheme and Scheme Background Color fields defaulted.

4. Select the Blank page style.

5. Click Create.

6. When you're in edit mode, click Add Content.

7. In the Catalog, click Lists to display all the lists that have been created for this group space:

   If you clicked List Manager, you'd be adding the task flow that allows others to create lists. Instead, you want to add the list you just created, Customer Questions.

8. Click Lists.

9. Next to Customer Questions, click Add (Figure 6-13):

   Figure 6-13 Adding Customer Questions to the Page

   
   

10. Close the Catalog.

11. Click Close to exit edit mode, taking care to save your changes.

    Your screen should now look something like this:

    Figure 6-14 Data Page

    
    

    Of course, the page looks a little thin now, since it just contains the Customer Questions list, but it's a good start.

    Now that that's done, you can start concentrating on conducting the necessary research to uncover the source of the Tony Notebooks dip in sales.

6.6 Step 6: Create a Personal Page

After a fair bit of research, you've developed a theory about what might be causing the problem with Tony Notebooks sales, but you're not sure that Monica would want you to publish it to the entire group space without her approval. You decide to first upload the data to a page within your personal space and let Monica take a look at it before making it public. Because personal space pages are private, however, you'll need to take some steps to make sure that Monica can view the data you're planning to provide.

The first thing you want to do is upload a document from your desktop to your Personal Documents folder. To do that, you'll first need to expose the Documents page in your personal space.

1. Click Personal Space.

2. Click Page Actions->Manage Pages:

   Figure 6-15 Manage Pages Dialog

   
   

3. In the Documents row, click Show Page, then click Close.

4. In your personal space, click Documents to display that page.

   If you plan to share a document with others, you must ensure that the document resides in your Public folder. If you placed a document from another folder on a page, while others could see that the document was there, they wouldn't be able to open it.

5. Click the Public folder to highlight it:

   Figure 6-16 Highlighting the Public Folder

   
   

6. Click the Upload document icon.

   For the next step, you can upload any file you have available to you. The purpose of this step is to illustrate how to make a personal page available to other users, so the content that's on the page is not important.

7. Use the Browse button to locate a file on your desktop and click Upload.

   Now we're ready to create the page and place the document on it.

8. In your personal space, click Page Actions->Create Page.

9. In the Name field, enter Sales Problem.

10. Leave the other settings defaulted and click Create.

11. When you're in edit mode, click Add Content.

12. In the Catalog, click Documents.

    Because you're the one creating this page, the Public folder automatically contains the same documents as you saw on the Documents page in your personal space. In this context, however, your documents are displayed as content "building blocks" with which you can build your page, as opposed to content that you peruse in order to complete a given task.

13. Click Personal Documents, then Public.

    You should see the document you uploaded in step 6:

    Figure 6-17 Uploaded Document

    
    

14. Click Add, then close the Catalog.

15. Click Close to exit edit mode, taking care to save your changes.

6.7 Step 7: Make the Page Available

The page is complete, but because it was built in your personal space you have to explicitly share it with others—in this case, Monica.

1. Click the arrow beside the page name (Sales Problem) to display the action menu:

   Figure 6-18 Page Action Menu

   
   

   Take a moment to look at the list of things you can do on this page. This is where you hide a page if you don't want to display it, delete the page, print it, and so on.

2. Click Set Page Access.

3. On the Set Page Access dialog, click Add Access.

4. In the Search field, type Monica, then click the Search button.

5. Highlight Monica and click Select:

   Figure 6-19 Adding Monica As a Viewer

   
   

   By default, Monica is added as a viewer, which is fine for your purposes.

6. Click OK to close the Set Page Access dialog.

Better send an email to Monica to let her know that you've created this page and what you want her to do with its content.

6.8 Step 8: Send an Email

WebCenter Spaces makes it easy to send email from your Sidebar. Let's take a look at this now.

1. If your Sidebar is expanded, you should already see your Mail pane. If it is not, click the Personal mail inbox icon, as shown:

   Figure 6-20 Expanding the Mail Pane

   
   

2. In the Mail pop-up, click Login to Mail.

3. Log in to the Mail server using the log in ID and password you get from your WebCenter administrator.

   Your screen should now look like this:

   Figure 6-21 Mail Sidebar Pane

   
   

4. Click the Compose icon, circled in Figure 6-22:

   Figure 6-22 Compose Icon

   
   

5. In the To: field, enter Monica's email address. (You can get this information from your WebCenter administrator.)

6. In the Subject field, type: Please Approve

7. Enter some quick text to tell Monica what you'd like her to do, something like:

   Hi Monica:

   I've created a page called Sales Problem that has a document I'd like you to look at it. If you approve, I'll upload it to the Tony Notebook Sales group space.

   Thanks, Zeba

   Your screen should look similar to the one shown here:

   Figure 6-23 Composing an Email

   
   

8. Click Send.

When Monica logs on, she'll see your email in her Inbox. We'll see this in action in the next chapter.

Your work as Zeba is now complete, so click Logout in the banner. Time to move back to Monica to see how she interacts with the page you surfaced to her.