A Survey on Users' Perspectives to Functionalities of Web-Based Construction Collaboration Extranets

2. Functionalities Of Cces

In CCEs, the main and purposeful function is to share project documents among project participants. Current systems are not only allowing sharing the documents through the network, but also enabling users to manage the files locally or remotely without installing any extra software. In addition, the latest CCEs provide many supporting or additional functions to facilitate the information transfer and communication tasks, to streamline the workflow and to collaborate with the other partners during construction process, with some customized environments. Some extra functional modules, e.g. e-tendering service, are introduced to the systems and provide additional functionalities to the end-users.

In this research, the authors use the categorization given in Liu et al. (2011), which grouped all functionalities into 4 categories: System administration, Document management, Workflow management and Communication tools plus add-ons. The hierarchical and interrelated structure of CCE, functions and features can be illustrated as Figure 1. More details about the functions and features can be found in Liu et al. (2011) and Charalambous et al. (2012).

Figure 1.

Functions and associated features for CCEs