PaperThin

New User Interface

CommonSpot 6.0 delivers a more intuitive user interface with a highly personalized dashboard called ‘My CommonSpot’—among other features—for faster publishing of content and massive productivity gains. 

• An Easy-to-Use Dashboard: The CommonSpot dashboard delivers at-a-glance status and one-click access to tools, information, and content at the server, site, subsite, and page level. 

• Common Menus: CommonSpot 6.0 features logical, task-oriented menus. The top-level menu is always available for quick access to personalized content and standard tools.  The second-level menu is page-specific. 

• Personalized Views: Everyone using CommonSpot 6.0 has access to personalized views of pages via My CommonSpot and My Pages which deliver productivity-improving and time-saving personalized tools and views of content, content status, notifications, and reminders, all in one place. 

• Customizable Left Panel Views:  Easily show/hide dashboard left panels to fit your working style or organizational needs. Individually customize the CommonSpot workspace with easy-to-use drag and drop features to add or hide left panels—such as a panel for instant access to 'The Commons' community site or Google analytics. 

• Consistent, Scalable Interface Components: Dialogs use a consistent, dynamic AJAX-based interface for client-side sorting/filtering. No complex page or dialog refreshes, no confusing pop-ups. Adding or deleting automatically updates lists in place. 

• Dynamic Subsite Pickers and Subsite Search Capabilities: For choosing, finding, or setting target locations for storing CommonSpot objects, version 6.0 provides dynamic subsite selection. View hierarchically or apply search criteria for subsite selection. In addition, this release provides subsite listing reports in convenient locations for hierarchically viewing pages and folders with a subsite.  Access these reports from within Site and Subsite Administration or while viewing/editing pages. 

• Drag and Drop Interface: Click & drag to select, order, or reorder items.  The order you set becomes the order used for displaying left-pane dashboard options, ranking favorites, evaluating keywords or page sets, and other CommonSpot operations. 

• Multiple, convenient navigation paths and state visibility: Easily access features and functions.  Compare versions within a page from the Element menu, from My CommonSpot, or from dashboard left-panel options. View state information and interact directly with content from reports.  Activate or deactivate, move, copy, or delete one or more CommonSpot objects with a single click.  Access More Actions or Metadata & Security information from reports or search results.  Rename, lock/unlock, change ownership, subscribe to, or create freshness reminders or work requests - all from My Pages, reports or search results, without switching to Author mode.  

• Advanced Search Capabilities: Search pages more easily with the new page-centered quick search, advanced simple-search filtering, intuitive and user-friendly advanced search, saved searches, and favorite saved searches.  Whenever you are searching for a page, template, uploaded document, image, or any content, CommonSpot provides a link bar for easily switching to any of these search modes. 

• Advanced Image Searching, Viewing and Reporting: Optionally preview images on mouse-over.  Batch select, copy, move, delete, rename, or upload new images. The Image Gallery has a cleaner interface and faster performance. Two new views include a Film Strip and alphabetical listing. 

• Store both page and image searches to save time generating frequently used queries. Create favorites for quick access and share searches to reliably distribute and update commonly used data sets. ·        Create and share shortcuts to save keystrokes for content or storage locations.  Use the New - From Shortcut menu option to save time creating new pages and other CommonSpot objects. 

• Contextual Breadcrumbs: The breadcrumb bar provides immediate visibility to hierarchy for every page view, as well as links to complete subsite listing reports. 

• Context-Sensitive Hints: Throughout CommonSpot context-sensitive hints guide you through choices. Mouse-overmenu items and UI widgets for 'What's this?' and instructional information. 

• Improved Error Messaging and Validation: Dialogs validate input and clearly highlight required fields. CommonSpot messages provide state information and guidance. 

• A Highly Customizable Workspace: Show/hide at-a-glance page status, version information, tools, page contributors, performance, and more. Individually customize the CommonSpot workspace with easy-to-use drag & drop features to add or hide left panels. Just one click to toggle tool display or submit and preview. 

• Intuitive Menus: Logically group page-related functions in familiar ways:
• • My Content gives you quick access to your personal pages, images, and templates.
  • The Properties menu is where you view or change standard and custom metadata.
  • The Actions menu groups page-centered move, copy, and delete functions, and more.
  • The Manage menu organizes freshness reminders, contacts, and other page associations.
  • The Links menu gives you options for how the current page interacts with others.
  • The Templates menu is used for viewing hierarchy for the current page and for template-specific tools.
  • The View menu is used for authoring actions and environment settings. 

• Improved Version History and Visual Difference: Compare the current version to the last version from the Element menu, or pick a version to compare from the Version History left pane.  Visual Difference is now seamlessly available on Windows and non-Windows platforms - no special configuration required. This release highlights page text, image, and HTML attribute changes. 

• Element Version History: With the 6.0 release you can now view the Element version history report from the Element menu dropdown. 

• New Rich Text Editor Pasting options: The v 6.0 Rich Text editor includes a WYSIWYG preview tool to show you how pasted content will look based on the options selected. 

• More consistent and powerful style sheet inheritance mechanism and tools: Add, order, and set precedence for style sheet use. 

• Page Sets: This release improves the interface for creating, viewing, and managing page sets.  Select multiple pages at a time to create a page set.  Easily view or change members.  Move, copy, and delete page sets. Click an item in the Actions column for more options – all within the table view. 

• My Tags: In addition to keywords, you can now assign personal tags to content and use them to easily manage and search.  

New For Administrators

The 6.0 version of CommonSpot delivers greater platform flexibility, data integrity, and security options, all within a highly efficient workspace for managing CommonSpot servers, sites, subsites, and content.

• Native UTF-8 support: The UTF-8 character set is enabled by default. No more extra HTML escaping.

• New ColdFusion version support: CF9 

• New database support: SQL Server 2008, Oracle 11g, and My SQL 5.1 on CF9 

• New browser support: Internet Explorer 8 and FireFox 3.6 

• Simple form submission: This release accepts simple forms submitted from newer browsers (Opera, Safari, Chrome). 

• At-a-glance server & site summary: Server, Site and Subsite management includes one-click navigation to site pages and one-click administration. Create, delete, navigate to, and administer sites and subsite. Manage contributors and run jobs, all from a single view. 

• Distributed & highly granular security: Selectively assign both functional and content privileges to improve workflow & remove bottlenecks. 

• Page-level performance reporting & tuning: View page performance in real time to optimize page display and easily troubleshoot problems. View pre- and post- execution status.  This release also includes one-click cache-clearing at the site and subsite level. 

• Advanced user and group management enables greater content security and transition support through content contribution summaries and deletion safeguards, including "undelete," and one click change ownership. Reports include views of user administrators, indirect and direct group membership, and groups without administrators. 

• Extensive, interactive reports: Copy, move, edit & delete pages outside of the authoring environment, view metadata and security options, manage freshness reminders, create work requests and view usage reports - all from My Content options, CommonSpot reports, or CommonSpot search results. 

• Improved keyword creation & management and content tagging: A drag & drop interface for intelligently creating content classes: set permanent, default, and enforced keywords at, above, below, or both above & below the current subsite. Globally specify the order keywords append to pages.  View keyword usage reports for the whole site or individual subsites. Keyword enforcements are now considered when running Page Index queries. Keywords are case-sensitive on all database platforms. 

• Advanced Elements management: Filter and sort by type, description, category.  View and edit associated display templates, render handlers, properties, field definitions, security and view usage, all from a single table. 

• Globally manage and distribute Shortcuts, Saved Searches, Keywords, and Full-Text Search Collections. 

• New Tools, Better Integration: CommonSpot 6.0 provides a new and improved Updated Site Migration tool that combines Fix URL, Fix Directories, Update URL and Directory Information functionality into a single convenient and user-friendly tool. Utilities are now more appropriately offered at the proper level (server, customer, site, or subsite), distributing access to tools to the appropriate individuals. A new Job Manager provides improved feedback on the status of running jobs, and allows administrators to see and cancel jobs. 

• Better Shared Database Configuration Management: The setting to take a Read-only Production Server off-line has been removed.  View status of file and script queues to ensure that data is being transferred properly to each ROPS. Synchronize CommonSpot to selected ROPS and synchronize Custom Modules and/or Site Content has been at the subsite level for more granular and distributed control.

New For Developers

The 6.0 version of CommonSpot delivers new IT capabilities—such as hundreds of APIs and a new development framework—that shorten development time, eliminate workflow bottlenecks, and make customizing CommonSpot even easier.  

• An extensive new API and API support for CommonSpot client-side functions:  Access the complete API reference from CommonSpot Help.
  
  
• Programmatic interface control: Functions for customizing dashboards and menus are exposed and documented.  Customize administrative interface menus through xml configuration files, to add your own menu sections and menu items to the dashboard. 

• New Open Source Application Development Framework (ADF): The open source application development framework was built specifically for ColdFusion developers to shorten development time and enable you to focus more time supporting strategic business objectives.  The open source framework consists of a set of tools and guidelines for intuitively building and customizing applications within CommonSpot.  This enhances the process of developing applications, enabling you to incrementally extend the capabilities of your CommonSpot site.  The ADF is available to customers using CommonSpot versions 5.3 and greater.
  

• • Benefits:
    
• • Deliver applications faster with an easy-to-use framework to develop new applications, customize existing applications, or leverage open source applications.
    
  • Create more powerful applications—mash up multiple apps to create more powerful and actionable applications that suit your exact business requirements.
    
  • Jumpstart development initiatives—leverage the open source code and expertise of the developer community.
    
  • Extend functionality with hundreds of APIs—customize and enhance the UI, programmatically import and export data, and easily integrate with any third party application
    

• Organization
• • The Framework—The core of the framework itself offers a central location and structure as well as an object factory for improving the development and deployment of applications.
  • Global Extensions—The framework centrally manages CommonSpot extensions, such as custom field types, custom scripts, and display and rendering components.
    
  • Applications—Applications can be managed in a central location on your server and deployed across several sites and other applications.
    
  • Utilities—The ADF offers a methodology for storing and utilizing common components and functions which can improve your process of building robust applications.
    
  • Third-Party Components—When the framework doesn't already have the tools you need, you may find them elsewhere.  Best of breed utilities—such as jquery—can be seamlessly integrated into the framework and called upon without having to configure each site or application separately.  

• Common Development Methodology
  
• • An MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework allows components of the framework to be accessed in a consistent way.  The object factory enables automatic CFC injection.  Simply drop a CFC into a directory in the framework, reset the library, and it will be available to you.
    
  • Extensibility: Library utilities can be extended at several levels.  Any utility can be extended globally by enhancing the framework's library.   Utilities can also be extended at the site level or for a specific application, without affecting other apps.
    
  • Easy Upgrade Path: When updates become available to utilities used in your apps, you can easily install the new version of the utility into the framework without affecting any existing app.  You can control which version of the utility is used by each app, and also manage if or when you want to start using the new version.
    
  • Open Source: All components of the ADF are open source, as are all apps built in the ADF giving you the power of CommonSpot combined with the flexibility of an open source development environment.  You can improve and extend the framework to suit your needs, and can also use the power of the ADF community to improve and extend the framework as new innovations become available.
    
  • ColdFusion: Just like in CommonSpot, the ADF leverages the flexibility, scalability, and speed of ColdFusion.
    
  • Community: A comprehensive set of frequently updated documentation is available online in the ADF Wiki.  You also can leverage the CommonSpot community of developers that—just like you—are building apps in the ADF.  Interact, learn, and share everything from code, to utilities, to full scale applications.

New Suite of Web 2.0 Apps

CommonSpot has populated 'The Commons' with a number of open source applications developed using the Application Development Framework (ADF).  Apps come fully baked, but can also be easily augmented using the ADF to create more powerful, custom applications that suit your exact business requirements.  New apps include:

• Article Editing: Contribute and manage news article content using the PaperThin Article Editing app.  Create and edit content, add call-out boxes, format content using multiple layout options, and easily optimize content for search engines from one central location. 

• Blog: Create multiple interactive blogs for your site using the PaperThin Blog app.  Easily optimize content for search engines by tagging it with metadata and keywords, and re-use that content anywhere on your site. 

• Content Import: Save thousands of hours of time on large data migration projects using the PaperThin Content Import app.  Move content from one site to another faster by: eliminating the need for manual content mapping; automatically fixing broken links and correcting link references as the pages are imported; and programmatically creating new pages using CommonSpot's Content Creation API.
  
  
•  Event Calendar: Give site visitors a glimpse of what's happening in the coming days, weeks, or months using the PaperThin Calendar app.  Enable staff—and your community—to easily contribute event data such as meetings and other social events via a simple forms interface.
  

• Forum: Strengthen your Community through an interactive discussion forum using the PaperThin Forum app.  Enable authenticated community members—whether internal or external—to post comments, follow discussion threads, and receive instant notifications when new comments are added. 

• Multimedia: Make your site more authentic and dynamic using the PaperThin Multimedia app.  Enable users—whether internal or external—to easily upload video and other media to your site from local or online streaming servers such as Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr; and add thumbnail images, titles, and descriptions for easy viewing. 

• Navigation: Instantly add pages to navigation bars using the PaperThin Navigation app.  Bypass the IT department entirely by enabling users to manage what pages appear in the navigation of your site, where they appear, and the order in which they appear page by page using a simple drag and drop interface.   

• Photo Gallery: Publish photo galleries quickly and easily using the PaperThin Photo Gallery app.  Enable users to view individual photos—or entire photo collections—and re-size, re-order, and add more photos through a simple drag and drop interface.  Photos can be viewed as thumbnails or in actual sizes, and can be presented in a variety of formats, such as Carousel, Grid, Shuffle, and Thumbnail—to name only a few. 

• Portal: Give customers, partners, and employees secure access to company information using the PaperThin Portal app.  Present data, applications, and information in a centralized location online. 

• Profile: Showcase human assets—faculty, staff, students, physicians, etc.—and bring a voice of authenticity to your site using the PaperThin Profile app.  The Profile app leverages existing ERP data such as name and title enabling authenticated users to easily create profile pages, upload photos, edit bios, and manage personal information through a simple forms interface.

New Community Site: 'The Commons'

Run by customers for customers, the PaperThin Community site—a.k.a. 'The Commons'—provides many distinct advantages that help you work smarter, be more productive, and better support your organization's strategic business initiatives.  Among other things, you can network with your peers and share you own, or leverage the open source apps, knowledge, and expertise of the PaperThin community.  Community features include:  

• User profiles, forums, blogs, and articles 

• Access to the ADF and apps 

• Information on Interest Groups, webinars, and other important events 

• Company and product news 

• And More!   

Log in to The Commons using your existing CommonSpot user login information.