BSCW Shared Workspace System

 BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) supports group work over the Internet by providing shared workspaces. A workspace allows storage and retrieval of documents and sharing information within a group of persons. Some basic awareness functionality is provided. The system is designed primarily to support self-organizing groups. A workspace can be accessed via the World-Wide Web, which makes it very useful for cooperation in groups that are geographically distributed and/or work on different platforms.
The system is under development at GMD , the German National Research Center for Information Technology, and is beeing funded by the Commission of the European Union in the project CoopWWW of the Telematics Applications Programme .

Documentation:

  

• BSCW Help Pages and User Manual , at GMD ;

• ``CoopWWW - Interoperable Tools for Cooperation Support using the World-Wide Web'', Appelt [1996];

• ``Supporting Collaborative Information Sharing with the World-Wide Web: The BSCW Shared Workspace System'', Bentley et al. [1995].
  

Useful Links:

  

• BSCW home page;

• Project TE 2003 CoopWWW ;

• The BSCW server software may be obtained through GMD ;

• GMD maintains also a public BSCW server ;

• The FLUIDS project (TE 2006) has setup a shared workspace on the public BSCW server . Parts of the FLUIDS workspace are open to the public.