Storing and Retrieving Documents in a Shared Workspace: Experiences from the Political Administration

In the following we will describe experiences made when introducing a shared workspace in a German federal ministry to support the cooperative typing of documents. It will be shown how the shared workspace improved the typing process, how storing and retrieval conventions evolved during a two-year period, and which technical improvements of the system functionality have been required by the users to ease document retrieval. Finally, it will be discussed which organizational and technical factors support the establishment of common storing and retrieving conventions in shared workspaces.