Price	Pretty steep! A Caucus™ 3.1 license includes the Caucus server, the Caucus Markup Language, and templates for a complete Caucus conference center. Licenses start at $2,995. Special pricing is available for educational institutions.
Platform	Solaris (also an NT  version in Beta)
Web-based?	yes
Special browser requirements?	Apparently not (need to check this further) - but it allows users to format posts in HTML, so that might introduce some browser-specificity.
Interface	Simple, clear. Navigational compass bar at the top is a good feature. The discussions are presented in a linear way, not threaded, which makes things pretty clear. New messages are added to the end of each discussion. The navigation buttons are a bit ugly, but can probably be customised.
User Options	Posting may be done as plain text, HTML, including images, tables, even Javascript (! - check whether that can be turned off!) - you can also include live hyperlinks to other resources, and upload Word documents. Users can re-edit their own posts after they have made them (or this feature can be turned off by admin.) You can obtain a list of "all users who have seen Item 3" Similarly, you can look at details for an individual user: "which items has this user read?" (this feature is open to all users, in the demo. - don't know if it can be resticted to admin only). ** You can search within a whole conference, for key words (This is a very good feature). Search tool works well, and returns a few relevant lines from each matching meassage.
Access control	Very flexible - each conference can be restricted to its own group of users, and can be "read-only" if required. See below.
Administration	See http://screenporch.com/DOCS/howto.html When the Caucus administrator creates a conference, he or she also assigns someone to be the primary organizer -- the person in charge of the conference. Caucus gives this person special abilities. The primary organizer may in turn give other people these special abilities in order to share the power and responsibility of managing the conference. To create a new Caucus conference the Caucus administrator for your site must run a companion program called cv2start. The program will ask several questions about the new conference. These include: * what is the name of the conference? * what is the userid of the primary organizer? * should this conference be open to everyone? * permit this conference like another one? * who are the other organizers (if any)? * which groups should be allowed to use this conference (if any)? Caucus gives the organizer of a conference special abilities to assist with setting up and maintaining a conference. Many of these abilities, such as controlling who can join a conference, are provided by the customize link in the conference home page (or the CUSTOMIZE command in the text interface.) Only the organizer can use this feature. It includes: * "Allow users to add new items?" ("item" here means "new discussion thread") * "Allow users to edit their own responses? * "Make the conference visible to non-members?" * "Edit the userlist..." lets the organizer control who may join the conference. A conference is created with an initial user list; typically one that allows anyone to join the conference. The organizer can edit this list to specifically include people, exclude people, permit read-only members, or add other organizers to the conference. The user list has a special format which must be followed precisely. Each line in the list contains only one word, either a userid, a group file name, or a control word. The control words are :include, :exclude, :readonly, and :organizer. The control words affect the userids or group files immediately following them until the next control word or the end of the list is reached. Group Files: When many people are using Caucus on your computer system, you may find that they fall into distinct groups. For example, at a university you will have students, faculty, administrators, support personnel, and so on. These groups may in turn be divided into sub-groups: engineering faculty, liberal arts faculty, law faculty, etc. Caucus can help you use these groupings to better control who has access to a conference. That is the purpose of the Caucus "group files". A group file is an ordinary text file that contains a list of userids, one per line. Users listed in a group file are members of that group. The name of the group is the name of the group file. Group files are useful when a specific group of people need access to several conferences. Without group files, the organizer of each conference would have to edit the user list for that conference and add the userid of each member of the group. With group files, each organizer need add only one line to their user list: a "<" followed by the name of the group. Group files are created and edited by the Caucus administrator (or anyone who can login as the Caucus administrator). All group files must be contained in the directory called GROUPS under the main Caucus directory. Each line of a group file must contain either a single userid, a wildcard match, or a reference to another group file. A wildcard match must end with an asterisk ("*"). The wildcard match "xyz*", for example, means "any userid that begins with the letters 'xyz'." CML There is some strange scripting language which underlies and controls the generation of the HTML pages - this is called "CML". This apparently provides a medium in which the user can customise the behaviour of Caucus, and add/develop new features. The authors of Caucus will apparently be maintaining a library of useful CML features: CML is a flexible and fully-featured control language for custom conference development. Using CML, an organization can customize its conferences, building on and beyond the foundation of Caucus templates. CML allows an enterprise or a developer tocreate new conferencing features and extensions, or to create a custom conferencing environment from the ground up. Caucus templates are themselves pre-defined and pre-designed Conferencing pages created in CML.
Working demo?	yes - http://screenporch.com/jumpin.htm
General Comments	Very flexible and impressive system. It seems to be doing most of the things at the administrative level that we would wish ? The central administrator just sets up new conferences, and maintains a set of group files. Each conference organiser then maintains their own conferences, and can adjust their user lists as they wish. It seems that the system is able to be modified and customised to a high degree - you just have to learn this CML stuff in order to do it! The major drawback is the price.
Accept / Reject	Accept for further study.