Issues in the Design of Collaborative Systems: Lessons from ConversationBuilder

The development and evolution of the ConversationBuilder (CB) generic collaboration environment has now been proceeding for four years. In this time we have learned many lessons concerning issues in the design of collaboration support environments. In this paper we reeect on our experiences, draw out these lessons, and discuss how we are adapting future versions of CB. In particular we discuss the pervasiveness of collaboration support, introduce four factors aaecting the design of CSCW systems | openness, exibility, activeness and data | and discuss how the user interface, collaboration and systems support layers of CB have been been designed to accomodate each of these, the ways in which we have failed, and future directions.