Document-Centric Groupware for Distributed Governmental Agencies

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. The currently available cooperation and communication tools do not provide an integrated and homogeneous cooperation environment suitable for this application domain. This paper presents the Cooperative Document Repository, an integrated document-centric collaboration environment. The integration of cooperative document management and document processing with multi-point audio/video conferencing provides a flexible collaboration environment within which a wide range of collaborative activities can be performed.