CSCW TOOLS - CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURES

Many companies around the world are decentralizing their organizationa l structures so that they can market their products globally. Facing t he growing complexity of today's commercial problems, these companies must work hard making their production processes more effective, augme nting their product quality, and reducing the time it takes to get pro ducts to market. Optimal working environments are needed that open new application domains for computer-supported cooperative work. To evalu ate CSCW tools and their relationship to collaborative processes, the authors developed a taxonomy as a. platform for specifying functional and technical requirements for CSCW systems. All criteria presented in the taxonomy are evaluated on flexibility - a key requirement to user acceptance of CSCW systems. Based on this taxonomy, the authors follo w two approaches which, when combined, result in an open system that i s adaptable to specific application domain requirements. One approach provides multiuser access to single-user applications. It enables user s to establish a group context by transparently sharing well-known sin gle-user applications. Additional mechanisms let users remotely point to shared documents. The second approach is based on a network of shar able data objects. This network can be accessed by various sharable to ols. CSCW systems generate a virtual common workspace, with a group-ce ntered interface that lets participants share the workspace, set up co nferences, and see and hear each other.