Activity Explorer: Activity-centric collaboration from research to product

W. Geyer M. J. Muller M. T. Moore E. Wilcox L.-T. Cheng B. Brownholtz C. Hill D. R. Millen Activity Explorer is the first product from IBM that supports the notion of activity-centric collaboration. This new collaboration paradigm organizes and integrates resources, tools, and people around the computational concept of a work activity, with the goal of increasing work quality and efficiency. In essence, activity-centric collaboration is an important and compelling example of contextual collaboration. Activity Explorer emerged from a multiyear research effort on activity-centric collaboration. This paper presents an overview of the most significant milestones of this research program and highlights the most interesting findings. The research behind Activity Explorer is based on many empirical studies, design explorations, and infrastructural engineering and technical simulations. We demonstrate how our research not only influenced product direction, but also the IBM vision for activity-centric collaboration.