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One of the biggest barriers to effective online group working has been the need for everyone to work on the same software package. Often many in the group have to acquire and learn new software.

That complicates the creation of online work groups and slows collaboration. Software packages that interoperate while providing online users with an overview of their colleagues’ work may finally threaten the dominance of email as the world’s premier collaboration tool.

Emailing large attachments to a distribution list is a pretty crude form of collaboration when compared to the application features on offer from major software vendors. But email has two great strengths. It is standardised and it is universal. The adoption of ECOSPACE standards might finally threaten the dominance of email in online collaborations. Researchers on ECOSPACE, with funding from the EU, sought a solution to the standardisation problem. They analysed collaboration applications from companies such as SAP and Microsoft to establish what is common and what is essential in the software.

Interoperability and semantic integration will lead to an activity based collaboration support

Next, they used their findings to develop a standardised architecture with software building blocks – or basic collaboration services – that would allow the collaboration applications to interoperate. The architecture draws on a semantic ontology – rigorous organisation of information based on semantics, or its meaning – that has to define and correlate the concepts and terms used by the applications. Working prototypes enable users of Microsoft Sharepoint, Business Collaborator {BC}, BSCW and SAP NetWeaver collaboration tools, to work simultaneously on documents and projects.

Seeing the big picture

ECOSPACE also developed a series of tools to break down another major barrier to remote collaboration – understanding who is available for collaboration, what their role is, and how well they are progressing. There are a number of tools that use visuals to show who is online and how accessible they are for collaborations. One of its most innovative developments is its ‘expectation awareness’ tool

“Very often you have an expectation from a collaboration… for example… that you will be telephoned at a certain time or that ten people will deliver responses to a report from you”

Achieving a collaboration environment through an integration and interoperability middleware and new

collaboration support applications

The expectation awareness tool automatically tracks your expectations. It prompts you before deadlines expire and informs you when they have been missed. The tool helps make goals and expectations explicit right upfront, and eliminates a lot of time-consuming progress monitoring. Wolfgang Prinz of the Fraunhofer Institute FhG, in Germany, and coordinator of ECOSPACE suggests collaborative working tends to focus too much on the past. With ECOSPACE’s expectation awareness tool, the future becomes more the focus.

“We say what should happen and then look to see what did happen,”

A second new tool oversees the project’s progression. The ‘collaboration mining’ tool keeps track of who is making changes or involved in an online project.

“Normally, this is not visible… It means that if you want to propose a change, you can address it directly to the people who are working on that part of the project”

Winning a world audience

All developments are tested in real-life environments. Three working groups act as ‘living labs’ and use the collaboration tools in their daily work. More than 50 public administrators, together with smaller groups in Italy and Switzerland, are networking, forming groups and professional virtual communities, and attempting to undertake creative work in more productive ways. They provide feedback on their efforts to researchers. ECOSPACE tools and services are also winning fans in wider communities – Basic collaboration services are also grouped in ‘composite collaboration services’ to make it easier for developers to use them when creating new applications.

“A lot of students are using these services to develop their own applications”

Little applications using ECOSPACE services have been created for iPhone users, for instance. Commercial companies have already implemented ECOSPACE services in their latest versions. The UK-based manufacturer of BC has done so, as has a toolbar developer in the Netherlands.

New working paradigms and metaphors for eProfessionals.

ECOSPACE pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment. ECOSPACE will result in new working paradigms and metaphors for eProfessionals, a user-centric platform enabling the interoperability of innovative collaboration tools and services.

ECOSPACE has four main objectives

1. The definition of innovative work paradigms through the analysis of eProfessionals and their related organisation.
2. The design and development of an open standards, service-oriented architecture for complementary and alike systems.
3. A collaboration upperware and services to enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers in group forming networks, beyond organisational boundaries.
4. The creation of new tools that simplify the complexity of collaboration in dynamic work environments and which enable users for creative and knowledge intensive tasks.

The platform will provide an infrastructure that will change not only eProfessionals’ way of working and collaborating, but the general way we interact and work with each other. The user-centric interoperability approach encourages the maximum of creativity in using whatever collaboration tools are available while safeguarding against monopolistic approaches and restrictive structures, knowledge workers, and especially eProfessionals, to easily network together, form groups and professional virtual communities for stimulating creativity and innovation while increasing productivity.