Help and FAQ

Your questions and requests are appreciated. Thank you, we'll answer you as quickly as possible.

• How to use the system?

  CoMindWork is a system for collaborative mind work. Everything in COMINDWORK is based on such easy principles.

  Companies

  Any user belong to a company. Company actually consists of its workers and projects.

  Each company has its 'inner project' for storing info and tracking tasks of company itself. This inner project is called same as company. For example, inner project of 'MTS' company would be called 'MTS'.

  Projects

  What's a 'project' in COMINDWORK? It is a storage of all data, both structured and unstructured, on a real company project.

  What defines a 'project' is a shared goal, which can be divided into smaller tasks and move forward to reaching the goal.

  Each project has a team, consisting of company users. In CoMindWork we call it "project team" or "project participants". From project team a small micro-teams are defined, which gather to perform minimal work atom, 'case'. We'll take a closer look at a 'case' hereafter.

  Static information is stored in form of Wiki-pages. Use pages for saving project experience and all sorts of project documents. There's a simple hint to determine whether some information should be stored as a page, or anyhow else. Ask yourself: 'When the project is finished, will this information be helpful to anyone'?
  

  In any project there's also ability to discuss ideas in form of a blog. This is quite useful, as it allows to share unstructured ideas, thoughts and discuss project-context issues.

  List of your projects is visible on the panel on the left. After a project is selected, you'll see "project navigation panel" giving control over all major project issues: goal, current state and reports, shared files, plan etc.

  Cases

  Case is a small trace of any work performed in project. All business-communications, commands flows are stored as cases. In other words, case is a description of any small goal in the project, and the process of reaching the goal. A case responsibility can be considered as a hot pasty that users pass from one to other, until the case is done. Case responsibility is marked with 'flag'. The person, responsible for actions that need to be performed in a case, is 'case-keeper'. When case-keeper lacks information to perform next steps, one should pass the flag to the person he asks.
  Each case has 'status'. Case may be:

  • submitted
  • active
  • closed

  You may set case status to '''active''' (i.e. work on this case is performed right now), or '''close''' the case. Please close the case when you don't expect no answers on this point anymore. When you re-open case from 'resolved' state, please use 'active'.
  

  Corporate Wiki

  All texts in the system - content of case messages and pages - is stored in format of Wiki. Description of its syntax you may find in the documentation.
  Pages may be edited, and may be discussed, as well as blog posts.

  Dashboards

  After you login, you get to personal dashboard. Personal dashboard stores the most important information on current situation in the company (all projects). Personal dashboard shows to-do tasks, latest page changes and other major information.

  Each project has its own project dashboard, that shows actual files, pages that are being edited and recent blog posts.

• Where to start?

  After you've logged in, you see system workspace. Workspace is divided into 3 parts: top header, left navigation, body.
  Header contains user-specific information: your name, link to your preferences and log out button. On the left area you can see list of projects you participate in, and links to main user actions.
  When you just open the system, you'll see user dashboard that contains latest changes in the system and all users' current cases.
  Then you may choose project to work with, either by selecting case, or project directly. When working within project, the Project Navigation is shown on the top. Please have time to explore what possibilities do you have when working with project:

  • set project goals, plan, requirements
  • see current state
  • create project documents & other Wiki pages
  • create & manage tasks and cases
  • assign people
  • see shared files

• How do I create new Wiki page?

  • From Project Navigation, use Pages -> Create New Page.
  • Fill the title for the page

  You'll see form with blank page and default content.
  Now you may start editing!

  • Type the conent in the form
  • Preview and then Save page

• Notifications

  RSS

  The basic way of getting notifications from COMINDWORK is RSS Feed. You can subscribe either to your personal feed, or to project feed. To do this, find RSS icon on user header, or on project navigation.

  RSS for all your changes is: http://my.comindwork.com/feed.aspx/Timeline/ManageTimeline?view=compact_list_rss&output=rss

  If you don't have RSS Aggregator, you can try FeedReader, it's lightweight and easy to use

  Email

  The other sort of notifications is via emails. When responding to a case, you can notify participants. Also, when you reply to the mail you've got, your reply is automatically connected to case or page discussion. Thus you can use mail-interface instead of Web.