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COLLA is a Web based tool to support and foster collaborative activities among members of a working group. Colla in italian means glue, so that it's supposed to keep researchers together. It is a work based on an idea by Paolo Diviacco (OGS) to develop a collaborative tool tailored on the needs of Geophysics. Colla is coming to version 2, which means that many efforts have been spent to improve its functionalities, nevertheless it will still need a lot of work and feedback form users. Thus, any suggestion will be warmly welcome.

Colla is a dynamic web site, any content is produced on the fly after user interaction. It is linked to a database that actually store all data.

The very basic idea is to concentrate server side all information needed to be available to all the members of a working group. This moves the focus from the common e-mail based collaboration practice to a server side paradigm where users are encouraged to use directly the facilities offered by the system. This allows to bypass all the limitations of e-mail as: the file size limit, the lack of a shared repository, inconsistent file naming, the lack of a shared search tool and many others.

At the same time users are notified by email of changes in their projects automatically.

Colla allows to host on the same web portal many projects. Data remains isolated from project to project on a user account based policy. The same user can access (if aggregated) many projects but cannot enter those where he/she is not allowed to. For this reason at the very beginning it is necessary to log in