Empowering individuals to design and build collaborative information spaces

Web-based project management applications serve project teams and virtual enterprises to manage project information anywhere, anytime. Central to these applications is an EDMS that enables team members to store and organize all project documents, independent of type and format. We consider two problems regarding the adoption and effective utilization of such systems. Firstly, the advantages of using an EDMS become apparent only after a relatively large collection of documents has been stored and organized in the system. Secondly, EDMS's currently offer little support for searching and retrieving information that straddles various documents. In order to address both problems, we propose a number of user abilities to add to current EDMS functionalities, offering the user increased freedom in locating and placing a document within a collaborative information space. We explore these abilities at the hand of two information environments: one developed for the Swiss AEC industry, the other currently under development as a common and extensible library for design precedents' analyses.