People Company: Be Part of It

Related Work On Collaboration Support

Collaboration research and development in the past decade yielded in a number collaboration and community systems. Although none of these systems matched exactly the requirement of our application we will present a brief overview on major concepts as they have provided a valuable input for the developments of the Baton application.

Since about 15 years Web based applications are available that support the coordination and cooperation of distributed teams by the provision of shared workspaces, called team rooms (Roseman, 1996; Bentley 1997). Initially these systems were developed in the research area, but quickly the ideas and concepts were employed by commercial products such as Lotus Notes and later MS-Sharepoint. These systems can be described as general purpose cooperation systems that provide a configurable collaborative working environment for many different working situations. Thus, they often provide much elaborated group management and access control services, but they focus mainly on the support of distributed working situations and less in the provision of community support interfaces for multi-media information.