Because all conversations are preserved, participants have a record of their discussions to which they can refer. COW can also accommodate non-University participants. Conferences can be public or private. In a course conference, the instructor is usually the fair witness. Each discussion topic is subdivided into conversations, and participants join in the conversations by replying to them.
Any participant can start a conversation.
They settled on COW as the best choice. It offers a fairly intuitive interface, and faculty can therefore administer their own conferences. A second version was released as freeware and has been widely used and customized. The Web Services Team modified Klavin's original freeware source code to create the pilot version introduced to U-M faculty and staff. The development team added Kerberos authentication, which allows access to the conference to be restricted if required.