Executive Summary on Current and Future Technologies for Collaborative Working Environments ∗

This document summarizes the study on current and future technologies for collaborative working environments (CWEs) with the focus on whether the current CWEs and their future trends are suitable for large scale multi-national organizations. In this study, we have analyzed structure of ESA with respect to organization, geographical distribution, IT environments and presented a list of state-of-the-art of CWEs suitable for large scale organizations. A list of important criteria for evaluating CWEs have been introduced. Based on that state-of-the-art CWEs are selected, evaluated and compared. From the evaluation and comparison of CWEs products, we have found that existing CWEs provide many features required by large-scale and multination organizations but those features are not well-integrated into a single CWE. Due to the complexity of collaborative work within those organizations, often many CWEs are used and it is not easy to integrate those CWEs together. Furthermore, there is a trend of providing CWEs under the concept of Software as a Service and supporting the composition of those CWEs. However, how such a system can be used for organizations where security is a main concern is still an open question. The work described in this report was done under ESA Contract. Responsibility for the contents resides in the author or organisation that prepared it. Name of authors: Florian Skopik, Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar Name of ESA study manager: Tamas Vinko, Ian Carnelli ESA Budget Heading: General Studies Programme This page is intentionally left blank.