Elke Hinrichs

Basic support for cooperative work on the World Wide Web

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely dispersed working groups. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realize this potential through development of web-based tools which provide cross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing web technologies. This paper describes one of these tools, theBSCW Shared Workspace system?a centralized cooperative application integrated with an unmodified web server and accessible from standard web browsers. The BSCW system supports cooperation through “shared workspaces”; small repositories in which users can upload documents, hold threaded discussions and obtain information on the previous activities of other users to coordinate their own work. The current version of the system is described in detail, including design choices resulting from use of the web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain.

Sharing to-do lists with a distributed task manager

We describe a simple and powerful tool for the management of distributed work: the Task Manager. Common tasks may be shared and manipulated independently by a number of people. They are represented as shared to-do lists at the user interface. With the help of the tool, users may organize cooperative tasks, monitor their progress, share documents and services, and exchange messages during task performance. The paper gives the motivation for the development of the Task Manager, implementation details, and a first assessment of its usefulness.

Effectiveness and efficiency: the need for tailorable user interfaces on the Web

Abstract This paper discusses the need for tailorable user interfaces, in particular for Web-based systems. We argue that user interfaces need to be configurable by the end users to match their skills and work requirements. We then describe what configurability has been induced by user feedback and how tailorability for various degrees of user skills was integrated and implemented in the BSCW shared Workspace System, a Web-based groupware tool.

Erfahrungen mit dem BUrovorgangssystem DOMINO

Das Vorgangssystem DOMINO wurde mit einer neuen Benutzerschnittstelle ausgestattet und zur Unterstutzung von Beschaffungsvorgangen eingesetzt. Wir beschreiben das System, die Benutzerschnittstelle und unsere Erfahrungen beim praktischen Einsatz des DOMINO-Systems. Wir gehen auch kurz auf die Konsequenzen fur unsere weitere Arbeit ein.