How do Qwaq Forums work?

At the core of Qwaq Forums is a powerful and extensible platform that offers the features needed to support business collaboration.

Scalable peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. Peer machines provide the computational power to run a collaborative, virtual space. As more users join a virtual space, more CPU and graphics power is available to support using the virtual space. Qwaq Forums uses a single secure outbound connection from each peer (client) machine that goes through a central router service to provide management services such as logging and QoS (quality of service).

Secure, flexible, and extensible. Qwaq Forums are dedicated, secure environments. To access your workspaces, others users or companies must be explicitly invited. Users can occupy many different Qwaq Forums as appropriate, allowing them to work on different topics with different teams. Different users can have different levels of access to Qwaq Forums; for example, employees might have access to spaces that business partners do not.

Software as a Service (SaaS). Qwaq Forums is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, including unlimited voice use, for a flat fee based on a per user per month fee. As new features are released in Qwaq Forums, they are immediately available to current customers as updates to the product are included in the flat fee. For customers who want to deploy Qwaq Forums behind corporate firewalls, Qwaq will deliver the server as an appliance to them for deployment behind their firewall. All communication (voice, applications, persistence) share a single outbound connection on a single port.

Rich tools. The Qwaq platform provides a rich set of tools for creating an interactive venue with support for 2-D and 3-D graphics and data, voice and video integration, security and authorization framework. As part of the tools available, a rich set of collaboration features such as whiteboards, post-it notes, and text notepads can be acessed. Using the Python programming language, advanced users can also extend and enhance the functionality of their environments.

Qwaq Multi-Share™ is a fine-grained collaboration technology and allows multiple users to quickly and intuitively share control of an application or content. All users in a Qwaq Forum can see how others are editing or modifying content.

Built-in VoIP and text chat. Every Qwaq Forums environment comes with built-in voice over IP (VoIP) and text chat.

Built-in data encryption. As part of Qwaq's comprehensive security model, all communications between users is automatically encrypted. Whether sharing confidential information or having a confidential discussion, all content is secure.

Open standards. Qwaq Forums is built upon the Croquet platform, an open model for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. Qwaq Forums also uses the Python programming language for scripting and standard XML interfaces for application integration.