Current and Future Technologies for Collaborative Working Environments

This document reports the final, detailed result of the study on current and future technologies for collaborative working environments (CWEs). The goal of this study is to analyze current CWEs and whether they and their future trends are suitable for largescale multinational organizations. To this end, we have analyzed the structure of large-scale organizations in general, and of ESA in particular, with respect to organization, geographical distribution, and IT environments. Requirements for CWEs used in collaborative work are presented. Based on an initial list of criteria given by ESA, we have revised and extended the list to introduce a comprehensive set of criteria for evaluating CWEs. The state-of-theart CWEs are discussed and classified. We have selected 15 representative CWE products and evaluated and compared them in detail. From the evaluation and comparison of CWE products, we have presented our findings of current issues and future trends of CWEs. In particular, existing products provide many features required by large-scale and multinational organizations but those features are not well-integrated into a single system. Due to the complexity of collaborative work within those organizations, often many CWEs are used in parallel and it is not easy to integrate those CWEs together. 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.