Toward a taxonomy of groupware technologies

Abstract

The rise of the global marketplace and the advancing of the World Wide Web have given impetus to rapid advances in groupware. Hundreds of products now exist in the groupware marketplace, and more appear monthly. To ease the cognitive load of understanding what groupware technologies are, what capabilities they afford, and what can be done with them, we analyzed hundreds of computer-based collaboration-support products and distilled their attributes into two complementary schemas - a classification scheme and a comparison scheme. The classification scheme provides a way to organize the many products from the rapidly expanding groupware arena into a small set of relatively stable categories. The comparison scheme provides the means to compare and differentiate collaboration technologies within and across categories. Taken together, the classification and comparison schemas provide a basis for making sense of collaboration technologies and their potential benefits to the collaboration community. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.