The PoliTeam Project Telecooperation Support in the Distributed German Government

Support for interpersonal cooperation in large, geographically distributed organizations is one of the great challenges for the infomation and communications technologies of the future. Cooperation problems are similar everywhere: in large economic enterprises; amongst the governments of the European states; and in the German federal and state governments, whose ministries are distributed geographically. Support for cooperation of this sort through information and communcations technology is still in its infancy, and is characterized by the selective employment of technology (standard PC applications, fax, and some e-mail). More comprehensive solutions, above all those which integrate these discrete components, have yet to appear. Comprehensive cooperation support, with simultanenous integration of existing office technologies, is the ultimate goal of the PoliTeam system presented in this paper. PoliTeam is being developed as part of the PoliTeam project, which is supported by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology within the framework of the POLIKOM program [3].