FIT Community Toolbar

Community Toolbar supports virtual communities

Virtual communities come close to the fundamental vision underlying the World-Wide Web, creating information through cooperation and interaction among the community's members. Our Community Toolbar adds powerful functionality for communication and cooperation to Web portals, thus helping active virtual communities to start and flourish.
While communities may focus on widely varying subjects and serve a broad range of professional or private purposes, they all need easy-to-use tools for cooperative information management, i.e., for finding, gathering, evaluating, commenting and sharing information on the Web.

The Community Toolbar adds this functionality to each member's Internet Explorer. It supports:

• Searching, gathering and managing information cooperatively;
• Organizing, rating and commenting on information in a community;
• Self-organizing communities;
• Spontaneous communication among community members;
• Discussion groups within the community;
• Awareness of current activities;
• Companion for the Web.

The Community Toolbar uses the BSCW® groupware as its platform. The standard user interface is an Internet Explorer toolbar. Thus its functionality is available with every Web page the user visits. It lets her easily benefit from knowledge that other members have already contributed to the community's repository and keeps her informed about activities in the community so she can react spontaneously.

Recently, we added Community2Go, a Web interface for small-screen devices. It makes the Toolbar's functionality accessible on PDAs and smartphones and is highly customizable. To provide extended awareness, Community2Go lets the user access a limited set of past activities in the community. Users can also easily send emails or SMS messages to members of their communities.