Supporting Collaborative Processes in Virtual Organizations

The expansion of Internet-based tools has opened new opportunities to improve collaborative work through the development of a new generation of tools designed to support e-work and e-collaboration. The concepts of e-work and e-collaboration have been evolved through the increasing demand of collaborative environments to support distributed networked activities. This trend has triggered the development of new Information Technologies in order to enable the collaboration and interaction of product development teams in distributed environments. The objective of this article is to describe a technology classification that supports successful collaborative engineering environments (CEE) of virtual organizations (VO). A CEE is then a platform that supports rapid respond to customers, and improves the interaction among members of Virtual Organizations to successful carried out activities of integrated product and process development. To develop CEE is imperative to integrate the right methodologies and technologies to achieve e-collaboration between VO’s members. For this reason an e-collaboration technology classification is proposed to improve and facilitate the understanding, selection and implementation of collaboration technologies in VO. Background