KOM 2000 is a simple, light-weight, and efficient groupware product providing different-time communication (forums) and same-time communication (chat).

This document describes the status of development of KOM 2000 version 4 in June 2001. Items under development (not yet ready) are marked with .

The software: Functions

The KOM 2000 software provides the following functions:

Open forums: Anyone interested can become amember.

Chats: A special kind of forum with special functions for same-time textual communication. What is written in a chat is saved in the same way as forum contributions, so that people can access the information at later times. 

Moderated forums: All contributions are approved by a moderator before sent to the members

Guestbook: Forum where people can contribute without first logging in.

Closed forums: Membership is controlled or restricted.

Restricted forums: Open to specified groups, closed to other people.

Courses: Forums with special support for distance education. Grading can be done by teacher or by co-students. Teachers can monitor student's contributions. Teachers can see an overview of a student's results as a basis for final gradings. Teachers and students can see overviews of their grade status.

A private area for personal information, personal messages and e-mail.

Contributions in plain text format and in World Wide Web (HTML) format including in-line images, attachments in many formats, also proprietary formats.

E-mail sending and receipt of Internet e-mail including html-formatted messages, in-line graphics and file attachments.

Incoming e-mail can be addressed to either users and forums. An e-mail address can be a member of a forum, and will then get all new contributions in this forum.

Usenet News: A forum can be connected to a Usenet News newsgroup, so that KOM users can read and write Usenet News articles.

Each forum has a description, a list of members and a list of contributions. It is possible to see how far each member of a forum has read in the forum.

Each forum, thread and message has its own URL, so that bookmarks or links anywhere on the WWW can refer directly to a particular forum, thread or message.

Inquires and trial votes: Sending a question and collecting and counting the replies, using more flexible methods than just "yes/no". Can be either secret ballots or open reports on who answered what.

An overview page shows each user what is new to this particular user - personal messages, forums with news, new forums. Users can also. search for and retrieve old contributions.

Contributions are read one forum at a time, and within a forum, one thread at a time. There is a simple tool for rapidly scanning through all new contributions in a forum and for viewing all contributions in an entire forum on a single web page.

The software: User interface

A KOM 2000 user uses an ordinary web browser (like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) to participate. It is also possible to participate through e-mail. To an e-mail user, KOM 2000 looks like a mailing list server.

The user interface has been carefully designed through many interactions of prototype building and user testing with non-computer experts, to make it simple and easy to overview for everyone.

SeniorOnline

In the SeniorOnline EU-funded project, KOM 2000 was used and added functionality was developed.

Select

In the Select EU-funded project, filtering and rating functionality was added to KOM 2000.

The software: Architecture

KOM is based on Java servlets running under a web server supporting such servlets. This makes it easy to add new functionality. KOM requires a unix or linux server with a servlet-supporting HTTP server like Apache. Many KOM servers can co-exist on one unix or linux servers.

More information

User manuals are available for download.

Demo servers are available for immediate testing.

The software including source code is public domain.

History

KOM 2000 is developed by the CMC research group in the K2LAB research laboratory of the Department of computer and systems sciences, Stockholm University and KTH Technical University, and is based on earlier software such as KOM, SuperKOM and Web4Groups-1.