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Ubiquitous and Integrated Teamwork Environment

Deliverables

The UNITE project conducted research and development on tomorrow's co-operative workplaces, in the form of virtual environments on the Internet. Such workplaces suit the needs of dispersed teams for achieving their project work under conditions as good as if they were collocated. UNITE co-operative workplaces come as an open framework suitable for the integration and composition of existing and future basic services to offer teams high-level, secure collaboration services. The project achieved all its critical objectives as they were originally set at proposal stage. UNITE co-operative workplaces and the UNITE co-operation platform realise the vision of a work environment that focuses on users' needs in terms of what, rather than how: UNITE users are offered high-level services that integrate basic tools, as opposed to a set of independent tools gathered under a common interface. These high-level services operate according to work contexts and provide team and activity awareness, spontaneous and scheduled meeting support in multiple communication modes like text, graphics, audio, or video unified messaging covering an open range of message types including voice e-mail, fax, and SMS, transparent security, and customisation. The fully distributed nature of the UNITE platform architecture does address the evolving needs of enterprises to conduct both in-house and cross-enterprise projects while keeping full control of their resources. This is particularly important for SMEs when they join forces and competencies for addressing their customers' needs. These scientific results have been confronted to real work situations and they improved iteratively to achieve viable and high-quality approaches. The project produced a consolidated coherent set of results that represents an excellent basis for commercial exploitation and further research and development. This set of results expresses the paradigm and the requirements of co-operative workplaces from several perspectives including business, usability, technology and organisational viewpoints. In response to these requirements, the project developed its solution with documented architecture, specifications and prototype. A panel of users performing trials in the context of their projects evaluated the paradigm and solution of UNITE co-operative workplaces. In addition to this tangible set of results, the project team gained technical knowledge and experience that has much value for exploiting the concept of UNITE co-operative workplaces and more generally any derivative design related to virtual collaborative environments. The UNITE team members can bring their expertise and experience to the development-market and deployment teams of their organisation. Through this process, they will bring the work community products and services that better match their current and future needs to improve their quality of life at work, the productivity of their organisation and the overall efficiency of work within society. In the context of research and development, the UNITE team members can refine and extend the paradigm of co-operative workplaces and the integration approach opened by the project. They can follow three main different directions: - Generic co-operative workplaces: more research is needed to refine and agree on a reference structure from which teamwork environments can be massively and rapidly accepted. Presently, UNITE only appears as the archetype of such a structure. One important issue to consider is the range of services that such generic workplaces need to feature. On this issue, close collaboration with providers of basic services and infrastructures will need to be actively sought so that standard interfaces can be defined in order to facilitate system integration and modular teamwork environments. - Specialised co-operative workplaces: derived from generic workplaces, they would provide specific fittings to accommodate the needs of teamwork in particular application domains where significant parts of the value chain are integrated through projects. Some of the candidate domains are product and service development, building architecture and construction, publishing, and education and research. - Organisation hosting structure: UNITE has focused on an environment suited to project work. Because projects are run in the broader context of organisations and people might be involved in multiple projects, there is a need to clarify the structure of the work environment required by an organisation to run and manage multiple projects. This outer structure, where non-project work is performed, and the structure of co-operative workplaces designed for project work must connect and operate in synergy. - The issues relevant to this outer structure and its connection with cooperative workplaces include: the management of physical rooms and resources owned by an organisation and their integration with co-operative workplaces, the need to monitor activities of multiple projects and to switch between different project contexts, and more generally, people's need to smoothly manage both project and non-project work as many business situations typically require both. In these three directions, the grade of service, security and privacy, knowledge management, and social aspects will definitely play a major role in the viability of these virtual workplaces. Although it is too early to assess its results, the project team believes that the UNITE project has made a significant step to help the development of the work community. It is only the starting point of a long transition period during which current investments and conservatism will hinder the development of co-operative workplaces. However, the needs to improve productivity, reduce energy consumption and pollution, and adopt more flexible working modes will exert immense pressure for change. These trends are irreversible.

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