Collaborative Work: Collaborative Technologies for Evolving Software Systems

The article discusses four major collaboration theme areas: collaborative information engineering; collaborative process and workflow; collaboration support (awareness); and integration of collaborative systems. Various projects incorporating these technologies are outlined. All of the projects described are developing component technologies intended for mixing and matching with each other and with technologies under investigation by other EDCS projects not particularly concerned with collaborative work, as well as with COTS software. Only GroupSpaces intends to assemble a full-blown, directly usable software development environment framework, and that comprises components, developed under EDCS and available off-the-shelf.