Box 5.6 Groupware as Collaboration Tool
Asynchronous Groupware
Email is by far the most common groupware application (besides, of
course, the traditional telephone). While the basic technology is designed
to pass simple messages between 2 people, even relatively basic email
systems today typically include interesting features for forwarding
messages, filing messages, creating mailing groups, and attaching
files with a message. Other features that have been explored include:
automatic sorting and processing of messages, automatic routing, and
structured communication (messages requiring certain information).
Newsgroups and mailing lists are similar in spirit to email systems
except that they are intended for messages among large groups of
people instead of 1-to-1 communication. In practice the main difference
between newsgroups and mailing lists is that newsgroups only show
messages to a user when they are explicitly requested (an “on-demand”
service), while mailing lists deliver messages as they become available
(an “interrupt-driven” interface).
Workflow systems allow documents to be routed through organizations
through a relatively-fixed process. A simple example of a workflow
application is an expense report in an organization: an employee enters
an expense report and submits it, a copy is archived then routed to the
employee’s manager for approval, the manager receives the document,
electronically approves it and sends it on and the expense is registered
to the group’s account and forwarded to the accounting department
for payment. Workflow systems may provide features such as routing,
development of forms, and support for differing roles and privileges.
Hypertext is a system for linking text documents to each other, with
the Web being an obvious example. Whenever multiple people author
and link documents, the system becomes group work, constantly
evolving and responding to others’ work. Some hypertext systems
include capabilities for seeing who else has visited a certain page or
link, or at least seeing how often a link has been followed, thus giving
users a basic awareness of what other people are doing in the system
-- page counters on the Web are a crude approximation of this function.
Another common multi-user feature in hypertext (that is not found
on the Web) is allowing any user to create links from any page, so that
others can be informed when there are relevant links that the original
author was unaware of.