TU coLAB saw the light of day almost three years ago - in January 2020. At the time, it was launched as a project with a certain "laboratory" character, as the use cases were not yet all clear in detail. The .digital office initiated the project to close the gap in a shared digital collaboration platform for all employees. The platform grew rapidly over the years, not least due to the changed working conditions caused by the pandemic. TUwiki, which stemmed from TU.it, existed in parallel, but had a different range of functions than TU coLAB, as it was also created for a different reason. Nevertheless, it made sense to merge the two systems into a joint platform for TU Wien.

"TU coLAB As A Service" project creates a unified system

This year, the TU.it project "TU coLAB As A Service" was initiated in cooperation with the .digital office to turn the "laboratory project" into a permanent service at TU Wien. As TU coLAB has significantly more spaces, users and a wider range of functions to offer, the decision was made to transfer existing spaces from TUwiki to TU coLAB. The migration of the content of around 30 spaces from TU wiki took place successfully last week. Individual areas with TU.it-specific information and personal areas are still open and need to be examined in more detail.

Two become one - with all the advantages

Both TUwiki and TU coLAB had advantageous features to offer. The aim of the merger was to combine the best of both worlds. TU coLAB has significantly more integrated macros and plug-ins, which will of course be retained after the migration. In return, the Active Directory (AD) connection that users were used to in TUwiki is now possible in TU coLAB. For users, this effectively means that they can, for example, now also map all employees of their groups stored in TISS in TU coLAB. SSO access via the TU Wien login remains unchanged.

This merging of the different authentication options for users was also the major challenge in the migration of the two systems: Due to the different login procedures, users were assigned differently. Therefore, manual user mapping had to be carried out in advance in order to capture all users correctly. Now that the migration has been successfully completed, it is only possible for TU employees to create new spaces in TU coLAB.

What are the next steps?

A few finishing touches still need to be done to "finalize" the system. There are currently a large number of inactive users in TU coLAB, i.e. users who have not been logged in for a long time. These must now be cleaned up to avoid problems with the number of users included in the license. This cleanup is now the next step. All affected persons will be informed in good time.

The changeover to a new license (currently Confluence Server license, new: Data Center license) will take place at the beginning of next year. For users, this consequently means that the much-requested calendar function known from the wiki will then also be available in TU coLAB.

What remains: The familiar "look & feel" of TU coLAB will of course be retained.