Organizing shared enterprise workspaces using component-based cooperative hypermedia

Cooperative work in Extended Enterprises needs a flexible shared workspace for team members to access and manipulate shared information objects in a well-coordinated working process. Current shared workspace systems do not adequately support the evolving character of shared workspaces as needed by Extended Enterprises, i.e. the dynamic cooperation processes, various kinds of shared information contents and the set of cooperative tools. In this paper, the usage scenarios and requirements developed in a European Extended Enterprise project are used to derive the requirements for shared enterprise workspaces. Our approach utilizes component-based cooperative hypermedia to organize shared enterprise workspaces that contain team and process structures, information contents and their corresponding tools. The approach extends classical hypertext models to shared hypermedia objects as well as dynamic bindings between these and the Groupware Components working on them. To demonstrate the approach, a prototype system and a prototypical usage scenario are presented.