IMCE - An Integrated Multimedia Conferencing and Collaboration Environment

The distribution of the German government between Bonn and Berlin calls for the technical support for the collaborative document-based tasks performed by interand intra-ministerial work groups. While modern multimedia collaboration technology provides many important features, easy use and control of this technology by the end user is currently still a big problem. This paper presents an integrated multimedia collaboration environment (IMCE), which integrates cooperative document management and processing together with multipoint multimedia conferencing and easy-to-use conference scheduling and control features. IMCE provides a flexible collaboration environment within which a wide range of collaborative activities can be performed. It is not the question to what extent multimedia collaboration will replace normal forms of collaboration and face-to-face meetings but which new aspects and possibilities it has to offer. With IMCE multimedia collaboration is just a mouse-click away.