News

Commonview Released

03/24/2008

We are excited to announce the release of CommonView on March 26, 2008. This tool allows users to quickly create a course or project workspace and provide students and collaborators with online access to resources including files, links, images, announcements, and Catalyst Web Tools. Design and development for CommonView has been guided by the mantra "Everything in one place, for you, for them." Featured functionality includes the following:

  • Add text, links, files, and Catalyst Tools to your workspace
  • Hide them until you're ready to share
  • Drag and drop to organize them
  • Create multiple 'views' to organize your material
  • Easily grant access to students and/ or collaborators
  • Post announcements in a dedicated space

Learn more about CommonView.

Collaborative Computing at the University of Washington

01/31/2008

Campus Technology magazine featured an informative article about Catalyst's Collaboration Studios in its January issue. The article focuses on how Catalyst is meeting the need for true collaboration through the use of innovative technologies available to all members of the university. Read the full article at the Campus Technology Web site.

Collect It Update

12/13/2007

On January 2nd, Catalyst will release an update to Collect It, the file dropbox tool that makes it easy to collect files and assignments online.

What changes will you see?

Click thumbnail to view full image.

The dropbox homepage has undergone a functional and visual update. This overview of participant activity now includes new icons to indicate late and on-time file submissions in addition to comments. Activity on the dropbox since your last visit is highlighted with “New!” in the corresponding assignment cell.

Click thumbnail to view full image.

Collect It’s management options have been reorganized onto one page. The new Manage page provides a portal to everything you need to maintain a Collect It dropbox and its assignments, including an overview of all current settings. Know what you need to, right away.

Click thumbnail to view full image.

Collect It assignments can now be reordered by simply dragging and dropping them into place. This feature allows you rearrange the order of assignments as you want them to appear to dropbox participants.

Catalyst Participates in The UW's Rosetta@home Project

12/05/2007

Heeding the campus-wide call to optimize sharable UW resources, Catalyst recently joined the UW's own Rosetta@home project.
Now in the wee hours of the night, while seemingly idle, computers in the Catalyst Computing Resource Center in Mary Gates Hall are actually processing data, and helping to find cures for HIV/AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer's and other human diseases. The Rosetta@home project, run by the Baker Laboratory in the UW Department of Biochemistry, takes advantage of distributed computing, a technique which pools the processing power of multiple idle computers, and attempts to develop methods to predict and design protein structures and protein complexes.

Find out more and and how you can support the Rosetta@home Project

New Catalyst Login System Supports Cross-University Collaboration

11/05/2007

It's new! It's free! It's easy! The new Catalyst login system makes it easy to collaborate within the University of Washington community and beyond. With a free ProtectNetwork ID, anyone can participate in your GoPost discussion boards.

The "Catalyst Tools Login" screen now allows you to choose your affiliation. For the time being, your choices are the University of Washington and ProtectNetwork, but in the future other universities will also be included. If you are working with faculty, students, or researchers at other universities and you would like them to be able to login with the ID that they use at their own institution, please let us know. We will contact the technology staff at their institution to facilitate such collaboration.

So far access is available only for GoPost, Catalyst's online discussion board tool, but expanded access to more tools is on the way! Take a brief survey to help us determine the best strategies for providing access to people at other universities or institutions.

Catalyst Web Tools Update

10/24/2007

GoPost message boards and Collect It file dropboxes are up and running with new features and enhanced usability. With these new tools in place, we are phasing out EPost and E-submit. These older tools became read-only on August 23, 2007 and will no longer be available after December 19, 2007. If you haven't already, please take a look at GoPost to see how it can meet your discussion board needs and at Collect It to see how it can help you manage online file submissions.

GoPost is no longer in beta. In response to user feedback, GoPost now includes additional notification options, a search feature, and the ability to bookmark a message.

In July, we released File Manager, which allows anyone with a UW NetID to upload, download, and work with files in both the WebFiles and Homer/Dante storage spaces using only a Web browser. Additionally, you can now access the 1.5 GB WebFiles space from your operating system, and you also have the option to search your files.

Also in July, ShareSpaces was enhanced and released campus-wide.

Our Rich Text Editor, available in most of the tools, allows you to use LATEX to add equations and symbols to your messages.

If you have any questions, please send an email to catalysthelp@u.washington.edu.

SharesSpaces Enhanced

07/05/2007

On July 9th, Catalyst released updates to ShareSpaces, the file sharing tool. The new, enhanced ShareSpaces offers exciting features to better support collaboration on files amongst groups of faculty, students, and staff. New features include the following:

  • Upload new version with comments
  • Revert to a previous version
  • Search across shared spaces
  • Search within content of files (for .doc, .ppt, .pdf, .mp3, .html, .rtf, .txt, .xls,
    and .xml files)
  • Receive email notification of recent changes
  • Enjoy improved navigation and usability

Important information for current ShareSpaces users

This update to ShareSpaces removes any link to files stored in File Manager, the Web-based file management tool. As part of the release and migration process, a copy was made of each file currently shared with ShareSpaces. While the original file will remain in your WebFiles account, a copy of the shared file will also be available in the shared space, and no link will exist between the two.

CUE Newsletter Spring/Summer 2007

06/12/2007

Read the first issue of the CUE Newsletter and learn more about how you could contribute to the Catalyst software development process. CUE -- the Catalyst User Experience Team -- was created to give users a voice in our development process.

Read the newsletter | Learn more about CUE

2007 E-Portfolio Contest Winners

05/31/2007

Sixty students submitted exemplary entries to the 2007 Catalyst Electronic Portfolio Contest. Judges awarded the grand prize, a 30GB iPod, to Jeffrey Erickson for his personal/reflective e-portfolio. You can view his work and that of the winners and finalists in all categories (academic, professional, and personal/reflective) online.

View contest winners

New File Dropbox Tool Released

05/23/2007

Catalyst recently released Collect It, a new tool for collecting files and assignments online. Stop filling your inbox with scattered email messages and attachments. Instead, create an online dropbox with Collect It to gather files, provide feedback, and return assignments online.

Collect It allows you to do the following:

  • Set open, due, and close dates for assignments
  • See at-a-glance which submissions are on-time, and which are late
  • Receive email notification of new submissions or comments
  • Post comments and return files to dropbox participants
  • Allow TAs and colleagues to view and comment on submissions
  • Download and archive submissions

Find out more about Collect It.