Working from home to some extend has become a normal condition in many areas of the University, due in part to the experiences  during the Corona pandemic. The need for collaborative tools is on the rise, especially to connect those working from home to those working on campus. This page will guide you through tools available at the Univ. of Cologne.

Further information concerning general services of the RRZK during the current situation can be found here: Current changes in RRZK services

Video conferencing

Face-to-face communications and meetings, be it lectures, oral exams, official and professional meetings, are an important part of everyday University life. Such meetings are near impossible at the moment. Especially lectures, webinars, public University and internal meetings, which would be quite difficult to hold if relying solely on E-Mail, chat or telephone conferencing, are more easy when using the proper video conferencing tool.

Chat and E-Mail

The e-mail service provided by the RRZK is a very stable one. Nevertheless, in these times it would be prudent to use available and easy-to-use solutions like mailing lists as a consolidated way of e-mail communications to avoid sending multiple mails when one is sufficient. Also please avoid sending massive mail attachments - to exchange data in an easy and secure way, please use other services provided at the UzK like Sciebo, SoFS, BSCW or Gigamove.

Collaborative document editing

If you use Sciebo, there is the integrated OnlyOffice app to collaboratively edit Office documents - concurrently and synchronously from anywhere, within your browser. If you work with multiple participants, you see multiple cursors and are able to keep a versioned, consistent document, which is much safer and easier than sending it back and forth via e-mail. The only requirement is for all participants to have writing permissions on the document’s folder. For this, everybody involved needs a Sciebo account which you can obtain by registering with your UzK account and then setting a separat Sciebo password.

If you need to collaboratively and simultaniously edit non-Office files and documents, you may consider using Git. Git may require more extensive knowledge of working with computers. Further information on this can be found under Special cases of collaboration.

Digital Whiteboards

The online tool Mural provides a collaboration platform for digital whiteboards. Mural can be used for workshops, planning or brainstorming together. You can signup via your university account. Institutions can collaborate via central workspaces. Mural boards can be designed variably using various templates.

Project management

Daily communications aside, which may easily be supplanted by RocketChat or similar tools, there may be the need to engage in long-term consistent remote project management. For these needs, the RRZK provides licenses of MeisterTask and a Redmine server.

Responding to e-mail requests collaboratively

To manage and collaboratively share the workload of requests via e-mail, the RRZK provides the OTRS ticket system. Via OTRS, requests can be commented on and answered by multiple persons synchronously and asynchronously. The OTRS ticket system gives a transparent history of communication concerning topics and requests  - and it works straight in the browser.

Sharing data

For sharing data in general, without the need to collaboratively edit the same document at the same time, there are several services available to UoC account holders. Details on these services can be found here:

Sign documents digitally

For certain documents (e.g. application for guest accounts) we require at least an electronic signature. As for now, you may sign those documents by using e.g. the touchscreen of your tablet or your computer, unless it is requested otherwise.