Concepts for distributed groupware operating systems

The majority of today’s complex development and consulting projects involve various locations and distributed project organisation. One part of the project team usually works at the customer’s location in order to analyse requirements, specify system functionality, or present project results. Another, smaller part of the team is located in the »back office«, supporting the other workers. In development projects, back office takes care of preparing and configurating hardware, negotiating contracts with sub-contractors, planning sub-projects etc. Consulting projects use back office support for all kinds of paperwork: documentation of results, preparation of transparencies for workshops, evaluation and comparison of new technologies, discussions with experts, etc. Due to their distributed character, such projects involve a significant degree of group work, thus requiring flexible and dynamically configurable mechanisms for communication, cooperation and coordination. Similar requirements can also be identified in distributed organisations with virtual business units or large project teams.