Self-organizing executive information networks
Decision Support Systems
Information management in research collaboration
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
The network nation: human communication via computer
The network nation: human communication via computer
An overview of workflow management: from process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure
Distributed and Parallel Databases - Special issue on software support for work flow management
Using the Web as a survey tool: results from the second WWW user survey
Proceedings of the Third International World-Wide Web conference on Technology, tools and applications
Intranets: looking beyond internal corporate Web servers
Readings in electronic commerce
Learning to work in distributed global teams
HICSS '95 Proceedings of the 28th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
An electronic infrastructure for a virtual university
Communications of the ACM
A study of B2B e-market in China: E-commerce process perspective
Information and Management
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In today's interdependent world, applications supporting collaborative interactions are critical for individuals, groups, and organizations. Most groupware applications are based on proprietary standards, necessitating vendor-specific tools and making ad-hoc collaboration difficult. This calls for a shift of technology platforms for collaborative systems ("collaboratories") from proprietary to open environments based on the Internet and intranets. We enumerate and analyze collaboratory requirements for three geographically dispersed electronic communities: individuals with overlapping interests but without formal ties, special-interest groups, and organizations with interdependent workgroups. The requirements analysis is based on maximizing the net value derived by collaboratory users and identifies sets of infrastructure and user-community-specific characteristics. We show that, to support these requirements, Internet applications such as the World Wide Web and Usenet and non-Internet technologies such as database systems and scripting languages need to be integrated. We also discuss some design philosophies for preserving the open but secure (where appropriate) nature of collaborative systems. We follow up our requirements analysis with the implementation of three collaboratories: one based on the Internet with a flat-file structure, one involving Web and database integration in an intranet setting, and one based on both the Internet and an intranet. We also report the results of a survey of users of the first collaboratory, which support our theoretical premise of a technological platform shift and the need for integration of multiple technologies for effective collaboration.