Assuming you belong to the right group and that the necessary environment variables have been set CASCADE is started by typing the command:
cascade
at the operating system prompt. There are a number of things that need to
be done for you by the system administrator. Should things not work
correctly for you, you might wish to review the appendix on ``Getting Started
in CASCADE'' which may be found on page . Also, CASCADE
works a little differently than PC and Mac software you may have used. For
more information of some of the differences between CASCADE and common
software applications see page
You will note after your first session is done that two things have happened:
For now, you can ignore both the ``Cascade'' file and the ``CASCADE'' directory. Later we will tell you more about their importance and use.
As shown in Figure 1, starting CASCADE results in one to three windows appearing on your screen. At start up, CASCADE will always show the large main window which is the primary CASCADE interface. Most of the time there will also be a small dialog window which will open in the middle of the main window alerting you to what has happened since your last use of CASCADE. If nothing has happened since your last use, this window will not appear. Instead the message window in the lower right corner of the main screen will have a message indicating ``ACTIVITY: None''. In addition, if you have specified agents you wish to run in your CASCADE directory, a smaller agent window will appear below the main window.
The ``CASCADE Agent Bar'' can have a variety of buttons depending on user
preferences. At the current time, the buttons that will appear are in an
inactive state - i.e. you must press them to activate them. In future
releases, the buttons may indicate that some of the agents are already in a
working state. (This will happen when the user has set that as a preference.
When CASCADE is started, the agents will start their work.) At the current
time, three agents are included, a communication agent, a chalkboard agent and
an awareness agent.
See page for more details.
Before looking at the main window in detail, consider what the small message
window is telling you. Whenever you use CASCADE, it checks to see what has
happened - i.e., what other members of the group have done since you last used
CASCADE. In the example shown, the message box indicates that five things have
happened since the user last used CASCADE. These kinds of events reported in
this window include document creations, comment creations, document edits,
comment classifications, and comment deletions. By pressing the continue
button, you will proceed with your CASCADE session without looking at the
activity. (There are other options for viewing activity and they will be
discussed later.) If you choose the view activity button, you will be taken to
the activity screen right away - see page
but we will talk more about that later.
The main window has six different areas as shown in Figure 1. These are:
In section 5, beginning on page we discuss the
various command options that are available in CASCADE. In the next section,
some of the basic CASCADE functionality is discussed. Keep in mind, CASCADE is
intended for use in situations where groups of people need to work together on
rather complex documents that are the critical component of the work effort.
It is not meant as a personal word processor, nor is it a project management
tool - a tool for managing a process where the document is simply an
incidental afterthought of some other central effort - such as software
engineering. Thus CASCADE targets document-centric projects. In section
4 beginning on page
we talk a little bit about
the tracking and data gathering capabilities of CASCADE.