Collaborative design review in a distributed environment

Publisher Summary This chapter investigates how collaborative environment technology can be used to integrate geographically dispersed design teams and other technical and non-technical members from within and outside the organization to support collaborative product design reviews. The creation of such a collaborative environment for design allows participants from different phases of the product development cycle to collaborate and form a virtual team. The chapter proposes a new framework to extend the current advances in collaborative technologies to provide access to local and global resources within design teams and the deployment of private and public design review workspaces to provide an efficient collaborative design environment. Also, a prototype collaborative computer-aided design (CAD) environment has been developed and the results are discussed.