Communities of Practice: An Integrated Technology Perspective

It has been observed that for a Community of Practice (CoP) to be successful, a significant amount of time shall be devoted to understanding the needs of community members. Furthermore, a tool to support the CoP shall be selected based on the kind of activities that are most important for that CoP. Since many of the tools available today place emphasis on a single type of application such as e-learning or document management, unplanned selection may rise unwanted barriers. In this paper, we examine the benefits of integrating some of the following types of technologies into one single technological platform and their impact on CoP: (1) contentand document Management, (2) collaboration / groupware, (3) web conferencing, and (4) e-learning.