The CROS portal and its facilities

1. What is the CROS portal?

The CROS Portal is a content management system based on Drupal and stands for "Portal on Collaboration in Research and Methodology for Official Statistics". The CROS Portal is dedicated to the collaboration between researchers and Official Statisticians in Europe and beyond. It provides a working space and tools for dissemination and information exchange for statistical projects and methodological topics. Services provided include hosting of statistical communities, repositories of useful documents, research results, project deliverables and discussion fora on different topics like the future research needs in Official Statistics.

2. CROS portal contents access

There are mainly three different ways to acces the working spaces where are hosted the contents on CROS-Portal and the search.

2.1. Home page section divide in five blocks giving direct access to projects,  communities and documents via terminologies

2.2.  A to Z: Access to projects, communities and documents via terminologies

2.3. Groups: This part contains all Groups of the CROS portal including all ESSnet projects

2.4. Search:  Perform a search of a word and get the pages/documents that contain the word

2.5. MY CROS: Only for group members. It shows which group you belong to, what are the latest content you have created and what are the activities related to your group(s).

3. Users

There are several kinds of users of the CROS Portal:

Anonymous user: who does not have a CROS Portal account. The user can see all public information but can’t write any comment on public pages.

Portal member: who has a CROS Portal account. This user can see all public information and write comments on public pages. He can modify his profile, subscribe to newsletter(s)

Group member: who is a portal member CROS and also belongs to a community (project or specific group). This user has reading rights for all public contents and for contents in his (her) own community  in the private domain.

Group contributor: who is a portal member CROS and also belongs to a community (project or specific group). This user has some editing rights for content in his (her) own community (creation of pages, uploading of documents in the private domain).

Group editor: who is a portal member CROS and also belongs to a community (project or specific group). This user has some editing rights for content in his (her) own community (creation of pages, uploading of documents in the private domain). Can also edit restricted content only visible to Group editor, Group publisher and Group administrator.

Group publisher: who is a portal member CROS and also belongs to a community (project or specific group). This user has some editing rights for content in his (her) own community (creation of pages, uploading of documents in the private and in the public domain). Can also manage restricted content only visible to Group editor, Group publisher and Group administrator. S)he has privileged to create forum topics, news, events, webfrom and FAQ.

Group administrator: who is CROS leader of a community (e.g. an ESSnet project leader). This user manages the memberships of his (her) community. (S)he has privileged edit rights on contents e.g. put private pages in the public domain, create forum topics, news, events, newsletter, webform and FAQ.

4. Facilities

4.1. Facilities on CROS-Portal Tools

Book Pages:

Group members can create book pages in their own communities. These pages can be an interface for sharing documents, announcing news, providing information related to communities. They can also update information by editing and deleting book pages.

Documents:

Group members can upload documents to the CROS Portal for their own communities. These documents can include useful and important information about topics or projects. Documents could be in various format such as excel, word, pdf etc. The CROS portal provides an easy facility for managing versioning of documents.

Forum:

Community leaders can create a discussion forum and members can participate to discussions about related issues. Thus, problems will be solved and experience will be shared via forums.

FAQ:

Community leaders can create Frequently Asked Questions on specific topics and disseminate them on the CROS Portal to the general public or to the community members.

Newsletter:

Newsletters on important events regarding specific topics or activities (such as conference) can be prepared and published on CROS Portal. Members only receive the newsletters they have signed up for.

Event:

Announcements of organised events (such as conferences, meetings, workshops etc.) can be published on CROS.

News:

Announcements such as call for paper, meetings, new publication can be published on CROS.

Webform:

Webforms could be used for various purposes. For example these forms can be used to build surveys on different topics. Especially they are very useful to register or submit abstract for conferences.

In Focus:

Some important events or activities may be published on headline of CROS-Portal using focus content.

4.2. Other Facilities

Notifications:

You can be informed whenever there is a change to a relevant page if you have subscribed to that page. This can be done simply by clicking at the bottom of the page in question.

You are automatically notified whenever new pages or documents are uploaded for your community except if the editor decides to not send notifications.

Comment:

You can freely express your personal ideas by making comments on pages related to several topics.

Searching on CROS-Portal:

There are a number of useful search tools for different purposes in CROS-Portal:

• You can use the search engine located at the top right for general purposes, you can then filter the results by content type, file extension, group audience, book and author. You can also sort the results by relevancy (frequency of the searched keyword), title, type, author, date, weight.
• you can use the “find people” tool for looking members on CROS-Portal or communities.

CROS member facilities:

If you are registered in CROS-Portal, you have the following advantages:

You can write comments on pages (when this option is open), you can send request for group membership and you can display a printer-friendly version of the pages.

Group facilities:

Each group has one or several group administrators who manage the memberships.

The group administrator receives an email for each membership request asking to accept or to deny the membership.

When a portal member is accepted in the group, he becomes member of the group together with all rights inherent to a group member.