Tailoring infrastructures: supporting cooperative work with configurable email filters

  • Authors:

  • Volkmar Pipek;Markus Won;Roman Englert;Volker Wulf

  • Affiliations:

  • IISI – International Institute for Socio-Informatics, Bonn;Conet AG, Hennef, Germany;Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany;Institute for Information Sciences, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • CRIWG'05 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Groupware: design, Implementation, and Use
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In fragmented work settings like network organizations or virtual organizations, monolithic approaches to implement support for collaboration would require the actors involved to agree on the usage of the approach or tool under consideration. As the autonomy of actors in these settings makes this hard to achieve, we suggest an exploration and an increase in the end-user tailorability of basic software infrastructures to enable even actors in theses settings to tailor their collaboration support to their needs. An example for this strategy is illustrated by using email as a basic groupware technology. We use server-based email filters to improve the coordination of work processes and increase group awareness in these settings, and focus on making it easy for end users to understand and tailor the technology according to their needs. We use and enhance concepts from the discussion on the "tailorability" of CSCW systems (a visual filter composition language, a component-based architecture and additional support for exploration and documentation) to implement and evaluate our prototype.