CoCoBoard Overview

The CoCoBoard, was developed by Ben Johnson, Paul Walker, and Joan Masso at NCSA. Ot allows a simple and intuitive email to html interface. Our interface allows users to mail to a single address, specify a project, and have their mail be posted on a mosaic page. In this sense, the CoCoBoard filter allows simple 2-level pin it to the electronic cork board type communications between collaborators, students and professors, organizations, or anyone else who uses the WWW.

As well as this basic functionality the CoCoBoard allows much more. First, the CoCoBoard is MIME compliant. MIME is an internet mail standard for sending images, sound, movies, and other sorts of attachments. Many mailers can support MIME (notably, Eudora, Pine, ZMail, and MH, but many others also), so the facilities are available to a standard user, if their mailers have been installed by sys-admins correctly. The CoCoBoard will take the incoming mail and turn it into a small icon with a link to an external image, thus allowing very rich HTML documents to be originated in EMail. Also, for use in collaborations, the CoCoBoard will echo any incoming mail on a project to the other people working on that project. That is, if a project is set up to allow posting from 7 users, as would be common in a scientific collaboration, a person would have only to send mail to the projects filter, and the mail would be sent to everyone on the collaboration; In essence, the electronic cork board will announce itself to your collaborators if you wish.

The software requires your server be a Unix system with a working installation of Perl 4 and the Image Magick tools, both available free of charge. The maintainer of the page must be able to create an account on your server to receive the email, and the account created must be able to write into your server space.

A Demonstration of a few postings from the current version of the CoCoBoard is available for you to browse.

The CoCoBoard Page / mosaic@jean-luc.ncsa.uiuc.edu
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