Teams whose members are in close physical proximity often rely on team rooms to serve both as meeting places and repositories of the documents and artifacts that support their projects. TeamRooms is a groupware system that fills the role of a team room for groups whose members can work both co-located and at a distance. Facilities in TeamRooms allow team members to collaborate either in real-time or asynchronously, and to customize their shared electronic space with tools to suit their needs. Unlike many groupware systems, all TeamRooms documents and artifacts are fully persistent.

The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical workspaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge about others ’ interaction with the workspace. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual workspace, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with physical workspaces, partly because support for workspace awareness has not generally been a priority in groupware design. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and then show several widgets that can be embedded in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware systems to support the maintenance of workspace awareness.

Collaborative systems provide a rich but potentially chaotic environment for their users. This paper presents a system that allows users to control collaboration by enacting policies that serve as general guidelines to restrict and define the behavior of the system in reaction to the state of the world. Policies are described in terms of access control rights on data objects, and are assigned to groups of users called roles. Roles represent not only statically-defined collections of users, but also dynamic descriptions of users that are evaluated as applications are run. This run-time aspect of roles allows them to react flexibly to the dynamism inherent in collaboration. We present a specification language for describing roles and policies, as well as a number of common "real-world" policies that can be applied to collaborative settings.

This article is a substantially expanded version of a report presented at the 1998 ACM CHI conference [Gutwin and Greenberg 1998]. Authors' addresses: C. Gutwin, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A9, Canada; email: gutwin@cs.usask.ca; S. Greenberg, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada; email: saul@cpsc.ucalgary.ca. Permission to make digital / hard copy of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and / or a fee

Through a case study of a group of systems administrators, we explore the nature of collaborative work when that work is carried out in virtual workspaces. This study shows the many ways that work in the virtual is different to work in the physical domain. Through it, we suggest a new interpretation of spatial metaphors for the design and construction of collaborative systems based on the notion of `place' or `locale', and on centres rather than boundaries. We use the observation that people work in multiple social worlds simultaneously, that these social worlds provide an abstract structuring over the virtual work domain, and that the individual will draw from this structure those elements relevant to their many tasks. 1 Introduction The CSCW community boasts a rapidly expanding corpus of sociological literature which explores the nature of work and collaboration in a variety of settings. These studies highlight the complex contingent nature of work and the importance of context for a...

This paper describes the initial design, our development approach and the first experiences of the POLITeam project.

A better understanding of how groupware systems have been evaluated in the past can help to frame the discussion of what methods and techniques should be considered for future evaluations. We reviewed all papers from the ACM CSCW conference (1990-1998) that introduced or evaluated a groupware system. Forty-five papers were included in the review. The main findings are that almost one-third of the groupware systems were not evaluated in any formal way, that only about one-quarter of the articles included evaluations in a real-world setting, and that a wide variety of evaluation techniques are in use. Our main conclusions from the review are that more attention must be paid to evaluating groupware systems and that there is room for additional evaluation techniques that are simple and low in cost. 1.

The collaborative editing of documents is a very common task nowadays. Writing groups are often distributed over many locations because of the globalization of organizations and the increasing interdisciplinarity of tasks. Since many writers already use computers for their jobs, providing computer support for the collaborative writing process has been identified as an important goal. Numerous tools for computer supported collaborative writing have already emerged but in most cases have not come into widespread usage. In this article the requirements of users for a collaborative editor are analyzed. Providing as much #exibility as possible to the users is identified as a basic need. According to the requirements summary a model for a group editing environmentis presented. The model covers cooperativework in local and wide area networks using synchronous and asynchronous cooperation. Finally, an application of the model is presented in the form of the multi-user editing environment IRIS.

This paper investigates design issues which support awareness in collaborative environments. The work we present is part of the POLITeam project, an ongoing research effort aimed at the development of electronic tools to support the cooperation of German government sites distributed between Bonn and Berlin. The paper addresses social, ethical, legal, and technical issues which form important prerequisites for the design of awareness functionality in large organizations. These aspects have been identified as the result of a tight interaction process among the systems developers and selected pilot users in a federal ministry. Based on these requirements, we present the architectural model of the awareness service of the POLITeam system. 1.

models of information sharing, and runtime support based on those models, are by themselves incomplete for the task of constructing robust, practical collaborative applications. To be usable, we must provide a means for developers to access these facilities easily. This chapter has presented developer perspectives on the concepts introduced by Intermezzo. We have investigated a number of components of the developer support, or "toolkit," in this research, including notification, programming interfaces for accessing shared data, interfaces for accessing collaboration-specific functionality, and the use of scripting through embedded computation. Notification is one of the most important problems to be addressed in any developer support: how do applications (and, by extension, their users) become aware of changes in their environments? This problems is especially vexing in the case of coordination, where information that may be considered interesting is plentiful, change is rapid, and the...