Hello,
to use Collaborator in a big world-wide operating company with different business groups that each have their own workflow these improvements would make life much easier:
1. a license mechanism that allows sharing the licenses between various server instances.
or
2. Multitenancy
Let me please go into detail:
To point 1: This way a Collaborator server can be set up and customized for each group individually but still users are granted access by requesting a license from a global license pool. In a world-wide scenario this license mechanism would allow a better flexibility in the sense that all users benefit from the different time zone that the other business units work. Exceeding the max license number during peak times can better be avoided. In addition, the use of standard license servers like FlexLM would give us sufficient reporting information that could be used for license purchase decisions, Nagios binding etc. to prevent the situation of license exceedance in advance.
To point 2: As an alternative to point 1 it should be possible to isolate the various business groups:
- there should be a new admin layer that allows a business group admin to customize only their project settings like review templates, review notifications, user-defined attributes etc. In Collaborator everything is global, which makes it very difficult. All changes need to be discussed in a global Change Control Board. In a first degree it would help a lot to have the possibility to assign review templates to review groups, because a wrong-chosen template happens most, and we need to guarantee that a group-specific workflow is used.