FIDIS Communication Infrastructure COMMUNICATION REQUIREMENTS & PREREQUISITES

In the initial step of building the needed infrastructure, we analysed the general prerequisites in order to get an overview of the needed technical facilities and the general prerequisites of the web-site. In this process, we identified the following basic characteristics, which the system had to meet: 

1. Communication within the research network: Being the crucial success factor, the communication between the researchers in the network had to be enabled. Therefore, a comprehensive web-based portal, supported by several mailing lists for different teams and functional groups, was needed in order to provide efficient communication.

2. Self administration: With the help of the portal, members should be able edit their own contact information as well as define their memberships to different research groups, such as certain jointly executed research activities.

3. Document management: The system should allow cooperative editing of reports, publications and other publishable material as another core functionality. The portal should also provide the required functionality to cover a coordinated and cooperative editing process for documents and other working materials.

4. Content management for external internet portal: The system should be able to provide administrative functions that allow the researchers to edit and manage the content and information visible to internal and external stakeholders.

5. Workflow management: Conducting cooperative research within a research project is mainly realised by cooperatively discussing and evaluating ideas and publications. With the help of workflow management and predefined processes, the creation of publications and ideas can be facilitated in a structured and formalised way.