What is Collaborative Work Environment

Collaborative Work Environments are software systems that allow teams, which are nowadays often distributed in location and organization to which they belong, to achieve certain projects or activities. In recent years, the available computer tools that can support such activities have grown; however, their integration is not necessarily achieved. Furthermore, users of such systems need to typically provide a large amount of setup information as the systems are not context-aware and hence cannot gather information about user activities in a simple way, and almost certainly will falter when the context of users changes. This chapter describes the inContext approach: a collection of novel techniques and a reference architecture to support integration of tools and context information to provide collaborative work environments for the mobile worker of today. We will explore in detail how collaborative services are selected and how context is modeled, and consider the details of team forms.