The E-Society Groupware Approach

 New Economy, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Community, Intellectual Capital and .Com Enterprises are examples of terms currently used to illustrate the transformation of the social, economic, cultural and technological order. With this new “way of doing things” the work processes are completely reformulated and the vision of a single worker performing his own tasks apart from the tasks being performed by the others in the team is clearly being replaced by a more sinergistic group work approach. To support the demand for new technologies that enable a workgroup to perform tasks and to create a common process understanding, the Software Engineering Laboratory (LES) at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) is developing groupware infrastructure for applications in different domains like e-education, e-commerce and e-business. In this paper, we will briefly discuss the transformation of work relationships that are taking place in our society and detail two technologies developed at LES to foster the adoption of the Web as an arena for business and education. The first technology discussed is the AulaNet environment for creation, maintenance, administration and participation in web based courses. Then we present the Scriba tool which facilitates the development of Java based Web applications showing its use in the AulaNet environment development. The paper shows some statistics of the AulaNet usage in PUC-Rio and the results of a initial analysis of the Scriba tool. Finally, we present some general research directions taken at the laboratory for the development of new e-commerce, e-business and e-education technologies. Index Terms  New Economy, Groupware, Team Work, Knowledge Management, Web Applications.