Wolfgang Appelt

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.

What groupware functionality do users really use? Analysis of the usage of the BSCW system

The BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) Shared Workspace System is a Web based groupware system developed at GMD that is used by more than 100,000 users world-wide. This paper describes an analysis of the actual usage of the features provided by the system, based on a statistical evaluation of the logfile of the BSCW server http://bscw.gmd.de over a period of more than ten months.

Designing a system for cooperative work on the World-Wide Web: experiences with the BSCW system

The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is developing tools that provide support for cross-platform information sharing for groups of users over the World Wide Web. The basis for these tools is the BSCW shared workspace system, a centralised shared information system integrated with an unmodified Web server and accessible from standard Web browsers. We discuss the experiences with the public release of version 1 of the system and the subsequent re-design for the current version (version 2), following feedback from the users. We describe particular problems, and demonstrate our solutions, arising from the choice of the Web as a platform for collaboration tools, and extend this to suggest that some of our experiences may be more generally applicable to the design of effective collaboration-support systems.

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.

Kollaborationsorientierte asynchrone Werkzeuge

Kollaborationsorientierte asynchrone Werkzeuge unterstutzen die Gruppenarbeit von raumlich verteilten Arbeitsgruppen. Die individuellen Arbeitsschritte erfolgen dabei zu verschiedenen Zeiten (asynchron) — gleichzeitige Interaktionen sind nicht ausgeschlossen, werden jedoch in der Regel nur in geringem Umfang unterstutzt. Sie erfolgen eher mittelbar.

Gruppenwahrnehmung und Kommunikation bei Web basierten Kooperationswerkzeugen

In diesem Beitrag wird beschrieben, wie mit Hilfe von Java Applets bei WWW basierten Systemen Moglichkeiten fur synchrone Kommunikation sowie Awareness-Informationen uber die Prasenz und Aktivitaten von Web Benutzern bereitgestellt werden konnen. Insbesondere wird aufgezeigt, wie diese Funktionalitat in das BSCW Shared Workspace System, einem in der GMD entwickeltem Web basierten Groupware System, integriert worden ist.