Designing a system for cooperative work on the World-Wide Web: experiences with the BSCW system

Abstract

The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is developing tools that provide support for cross-platform information sharing for groups of users over the World Wide Web. The basis for these tools is the BSCW shared workspace system, a centralised shared information system integrated with an unmodified Web server and accessible from standard Web browsers. We discuss the experiences with the public release of version 1 of the system and the subsequent re-design for the current version (version 2), following feedback from the users. We describe particular problems, and demonstrate our solutions, arising from the choice of the Web as a platform for collaboration tools, and extend this to suggest that some of our experiences may be more generally applicable to the design of effective collaboration-support systems.