P505 Wide Area CSCW - tools and applications

Rationale
Recent advances in the network and the end system technology as well as the developments in the structuring and organising of work strongly indicate that there is a potential market for highly distributed, wide area CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Working) supported by public telecommunications. A fact-finding study on wide area CSCW, initiated by EURESCOM and completed in December 1993 recommends among others that PNOs should be aware of what is available in the area of CSCW and also should use CSCW and demonstrate the advantages of wide area CSCW to a wide user community. In the same study some suggestions were made concerning areas in which possible future activities could take place, for example:

• support of CSCW via Intelligent Networks (IN)
• provision of a CSCW service to a group of users (e.g. in VPN, Virtual Private Network)
• basic standards for wide area group working.

Especially concerning the last area, it should be stressed that CSCW applications will only gain a significant market share, if the current and future developments of applications are compatible, i.e. if they can be implemented on different hardware and operating systems and are supported by networks, that are capable of transferring this information in the most appropriate way. A communication system is a combination of communication services and communication networks. Complex applications like wide area CSCW need a dynamic combination of communication services which support:

• transfer of multimedia information
• remote interactive multimedia data base access
• audio-visual interpersonal communication
• joint distributed processing of information.

Considering the recommendations of the above mentioned fact-finding study, this project should apart from concentrating on the specifications in a certain area; it should conduct its work using CSCW tools/applications. This means that the participants in this project should use, as far as possible, wide area CSCW in order to co-operate while working on the specifications. This could include for example interpersonal communication, joint working or information sharing.

Objectives
The main objectives of this project are to:

• evaluate some of the most interesting CSCW tools/applications
• create service packages of these tools to meet the needs of special user groups (e.g EURESCOM project participants)
• define the SW and HW platforms to be able to test these tools
• implement a pilot environment
• make trials and collect results/experiences

Duration - Project start: Jan 95 - Project Completion: Feb 97

Results For Full Publication - None