The members of a workspace form a BSCW group called ‘Members of workspace-name’. Vice versa, every BSCW group is associated to a shared workspace, i.e. there is no workspace without its group and no group without its workspace.

BSCW groups are a useful tool for the administration of workspace membership or shared mailing lists and for the management of access rights. In particular, a BSCW group lets you store and update the assignment of persons to a role in a single place. At the same time, this information may be used in many places (e.g., for assigning access rights) and is automatically updated should membership or role assignment be changed in the BSCW group.

• Create workspaces for smaller groups of users whom you want to treat as groups on their own because of their function or the tasks they work on.
• Click  File    To Address Book  in the top menu of the members’ page of such a workspace in order to add the BSCW group formed by all the members to your address book.
• You may now invite such a whole BSCW group as membes to new workspaces.

As experienced user you may drive this kind of group structuring further by selecting arbitrary members of a workspace group or arbitrary entries in your address book to form a new group.

• Select entries in a members’ page or in your address book page.
• Choose  | make group |  from the selection menu bar to bring up the ‘Make group’ form that lets you create the new group together with its workspace. The name of the new workspace is the group name that you enter in this form. The entries selected ‘disappear’ from the list where you have selected them; they are replaced by the new entry ‘Members of group-name’.
• Click the new entry to display the members’ page of the new workspace. There you find the individual entries for the members of the new BSCW group.

Note:

If you have selected entries for this new BSCW group that represent pending users of the BSCW server (see 4.5.1), BSCW will automatically re-invite them to register.

The new workspace corresponding to the new group will show up on the top level in the home folders of all its members.

If you have created the new BSCW group as a subset of the members of a workspace, this original workspace will no longer appear in its old location in the folder hierarchies of the members of the new group. It will now be embedded in the newly created workspace that is located in the home folders of these members.

Since you have modified other people’s folder hierarchies, you may want to inform them about the new group and workspace, so they move the new workspace to a suitable position, and not simply delete it.

Note:

In case you have created the new BSCW group as a kind of personal mailing list, you should modify the access rights of the workspace members (see 4.7) and deny the right to add or remove other members. If you leave the default access rights in effect, other members might inadvertently edit what you consider as your private address list, though it is in fact a shared address list.