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GROUPBOARD/GROUPWORLD NEWSLETTER - April 2007

This is an occasional newsletter which is sent out to all registered Groupboard and GroupWorld.net customers a few times a year.

CONTENTS

Upload doc/pdf/ppt/xls/tiff now available for Groupworld.net and Groupboard.
Port 80 firewall tunnelling cgi script for Groupboard standalone server.
New groupboard.com server.
New Groupboard Designer features: improved print and sorted background list.
New url options for Groupboard and Groupboard Designer.net.

Upload doc/pdf/ppt/xls/tiff now available for Groupworld.net and Groupboard

We have added a new feature to Groupboard Designer and GroupWorld.net which allows you to upload .doc, .ppt, .xls, .tiff and .pdf files, and they will automatically be converted into jpeg or png background images which can then be loaded onto the whiteboard.

If you are using a hosted version of Groupboard Designer and you are using the designer_3dlook.cgi script to access your board, you will have this feature automatically. Otherwise please contact us for details.

Please let us know if you encounter any problems using the conversion, or if the results are not what you would expect.

Port 80 firewall tunnelling cgi script for Groupboard standalone server

We have had port 80 firewall tunnelling in the hosted version of Groupboard for the past 6 years (see items 10 and 11 in the Admin FAQ for more details).

For the standalonse server version, in order to set up port 80 firewall tunnelling on your own server, previously you needed to integrate a module into your web server, which meant it only worked on Apache 1.3 on Linux. We now have a perl cgi script which allows you to use port 80 firewall tunnelling on any web server by simply copying the cgi script to your cgi-bin directory. Contact us for more details.

New groupboard.com server

Due to a hard disk failure, we had to move to a new server recently. We managed to get everything restored to the new server, and all features should be up and running normally now. The new server has RAID5 (mirrored) hard disks and more memory, so response time should be improved and we will be better protected from disk failure in future.

New Groupboard Designer features: improved print and sorted background list

Previously when you used the Print button in Groupboard Designer it printed at 72dpi, which resulted in very poor quality. We have now bypassed the java print and implemented our own print-via-png function (it will save the picture as a png on the server, then print the png). What this means is that when you press the Print button on the left-hand side, it will now print the drawing at the resolution of the whiteboard, resulting in much better quality.

We have also modified the "set background" window in Groupboard Designer so that the backgrounds are listed in sorted order.

New url options for Groupboard and Groupboard Designer

We have added a number of new url options to the board_3dlook.cgi and designer_3dlook.cgi scripts for Groupboard and Groupboard Designer, so you can now control more features of the board just by adding url parameters without having to edit the html code. For a full list of the options available, just click the "admin guide" button at the top of your admin page (add &admin=true to the url to get the admin page).