The 500-plus members and nearly 50 communities on O3 Collaboration - ORION's new online professional and social networking service for researchers and educators - may have noticed some new features recently added to the platform.

Last month a crop of new web publishing features were made available by IGLOO, the online community and social network partner that powers the O3 Collaboration service.

• Through Site Manager, users can now quickly add to and update the global community site map using the new drag and drop tool.
  
  
• Web Pages is the new framework for creating and managing the layout of pages that allows greater flexibility on publishing community content.
  
  
• Users can now populate community web pages with dynamic content by simply dragging and dropping widgets onto a web page. External widgets like Twitter and SalesForce.com are also available.
  
  
• Another enhancement allows users to save any community page as a draft and worked on later.
  
  
• As well, when users are ready to publish a community web page, they can now preview it to confirm content and layout.
  
  
• Through Version Control, all past versions of any web page are saved so users can re-publish older versions if the need arises.
  
  
• Finally, users can say good bye to folders when creating community web pages. They are now used for storing and organizing your community documents.

Guests are invited to sign up for a free webinar to learn more about O3 and how it may help research teams stay connected and work collaboratively online using web 2.0 tools. Join O3 Community Manager, Gary Hilson, on any of the following three Thursdays: Jan. 28, Feb. 4 and Feb. 11 from 1:30 to 2 pm.

To sign up for a webinar, visit www.othree.ca/webinars.