“Let's see your Search-Tool!” – On the Collaborative use of Tailored Artifacts

Groupware applications should be tailorable on different levels of complexity to encourage individual learning and collaborative tailoring activities. A search tool has been developed which offers different levels of tailoring complexity by means of hierarchically organized component languages. Users could create alternative search tools and compound components by themselves. Search tool alternatives and compound components could also be shared among the users. When introducing this tool into an organization of the political administration, it turned out that the users had considerable problems in understanding the functioning of artifacts created by someone else. To ease cooperative tailoring activities, we have implemented features, which allow users to structure, describe, and explore shared components and search tool alternatives. Also we provided means to store and exchange examples for components’ use.