Virtual environments for collaborations
The UNITE Cooperative Workplace and Cooperation Platform meet user needs by offering high-level services with integrated basic tools. They provide an open framework that ensures secure collaboration on projects as if the various teams were located in the same place. The project developed a paradigm to reflect the requirements of cooperative workplaces from the points of view of business, usability, technology and organisation. This then formed the basis for the UNITE architecture, specification and prototype. There is potential to refine and extend the UNITE collaborative model in three different directions. The first is generic cooperative workplaces, where a reference structure and standard interfaces are defined. The second is a specialised cooperative workplaces, where specific needs are accommodated for particular application domains, such as education, publishing or construction. The third is organisation hosting structure, where the needs of managing multiple projects are reflected, including integration of physical resources, monitoring of multiple activities and switching between project contexts. Service, security, privacy, knowledge management and social aspects will all influence the viability of these virtual workplaces. Their potential for the closer collaboration of distributed teams however, will surely become ever more important in improving productivity, reducing energy consumption and pollution and adopting flexible working patterns. The UNITE project team have gained valuable technical knowledge and experience through the development and trials stages. This expertise can be applied to the development and deployment teams of organisations, enabling related designs in the field of virtual collaborative environments.
Keywords
UNITE
