Leave the office, bring your colleagues: design solutions for mobile teamworkers

One of the keys to successful deployment of mobile multimedia technology among professionals lies in identifying inherently distributed teams working under real-time constraints in dynamic field environments where the need to increase the efficiency of co-ordination, communication and collaboration is apparent. We report on some findings from investigating such non-office/out-of-office user-groups, and discuss the design of a portable environment for supporting the virtual reinforcement of teams, with special emphasis on co-worker status monitoring with respect to process phase, availability, geographical position etc.