Microsoft First Contact: The Borg Experiment

We describe our experiences in developing a Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) prototype based only on Microsoft software. We undertook this experiment to gain insight into exactly how the various Microsoft infrastructural components and application packages could be used in developing collaborative systems. The paper contains a brief overview of the technologies we explored. Based on the knowledge gained during this first phase of the study, we decided upon the functional requirements for the prototype. Sometime during this period our coworkers began calling us “the Borg” after the Star Trek characters. We accepted this and developed our demonstration based on the Borg theme. We describe in detail the implementation of the prototype and show screen dumps of the running system. We make extensive use of the windows-browser integration to create a domain specific environment. A novel aspect of our system is how we provide “presence and awareness” by representing users (Borg) in the file system as file short-cuts. We conclude with some reflections on our experiment and provide thoughts on how future CSCW systems will be implemented using the Microsoft platform.