A survey and comparison of CSCW groupware applications

• Authors: Jiten Rama;Judith Bishop
• Venue: SAICSIT '06 Proceedings of the 2006 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on IT research in developing countries
• Year: 2006

Technology plays an ever-increasing role in our everyday lives. We would like it to be a help rather than a hurdle in our work, particularly in collaborating with others. An emerging problem for both individuals and groups is information spread and neglect, where users have the same copy of the same work, stored on various conventional devices, but no way to keep track of where the most recent version resides. One type of computer support collaborative work application, groupware, tackles this problem, aiming to assist in joint authoring projects, where artifacts such as files, pictures, reports and sound are being gathered to form a whole. Such groupware systems - and we survey seven of them - vary in terms of their functional, architectural, focal, temporal, user involvement and platform dependencies. While we found a wide variety of options for each system, there were also strong commonalities. All of them work with closed communities or groups. There is no public file sharing. All users are aware of all other collaborators in the community and all systems focus on collaboration; not sharing. The comparison includes our own system Nomad, a framework for distributed resource management, with special emphasis placed on the accessibility of information stored on detached devices, such as personal computers, laptops, PDA's and flash-disks. In the comparison, Nomad has advantages of flexibility and temporal independence over the other systems, together with low requirements on the user, and a high level of mobility and platform independence. The contributions of this paper are twofold: we identify and define a specific type of CSCW, groupware, together with a set of criteria for evaluating such systems; and we survey and classify some of the main systems according to the criteria, as well as introducing a custom-designed system, Nomad. From these results, a collaborative group of workers can more easily select a specific groupware that suits its needs. Moreover, designers of new systems will find the commonality factors useful, so they can more easily position their own products.