Supporting the change of cooperation patterns by integrated collaboration tools

Abstract

Although a number of new collaboration systems emerged of the last years, it is remarkable that email is still the most used collaboration application. However, this messaging based pattern of organizing collaboration causes a lot of problems like information and attachment overload and versioning problems. This paper discusses some of these problems as well as reasons why users are reluctant to switch to alternative cooperation means like document sharing in virtual project environments. Based on these observations we present tools developed with the EU funded Ecospace project that address these issue. These tools simplify the sharing process by combining and integrating sharing functionality with messaging, thus reducing the functional and cognitive distance between both environments. © 2009 IFIP.