Integrating productmodel and whiteboard to ease collaborative work in global product development

Abstract

Product development was deeply modified by globalisation. New practises to ease remote collaborative work are expected. Many methods and tools were developed for this objective in a fragmented vision depending of the usage contexts. The computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) community defined tools dedicated to generic collaboration without specialisation about a specific business. Under this classification, whiteboards are dedicated to synchronous remote work around unstructured sketches. On another point of view the design community developed new shared models for structured information about the product. This chapter proposes the integration of both in order to create whiteboards dedicated to technical business activities. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.