Collaborative working environment

A collaborative working environment (CWE) supports people (e.g., e-professionals) in their individual and cooperative work. Research in CWE involves organisational, technical, and social issues.

The following applications or services are considered elements of a CWE:


 * E-mail
 * Instant messaging
 * Application sharing
 * Videoconferencing
 * Collaborative workspace and document management
 * Task- and workflow-management
 * Wiki group or community effort to edit wiki pages (e.g. wiki pages describing concepts to enable a common understanding within a group or community)
 * Blogging where entries are categorised by groups or communities or other concepts supporting collaboration

Description
Working practices are evolving from the traditional proximity or geographical collocation paradigm to a virtual collocation paradigm where professionals work together whatever their geographical location. In this context, e-professionals use a collaborative working environment which provides the capabilities to share information and exchange views in order to reach a common understanding. Such a level of common understanding enables an effective and efficient collaboration among different expertises.

The concept of CWE is derived from the concept of virtual workspaces , and is related to the concept of ework; it extends the traditional concept of the professional to include any type of knowledge worker who intensively uses information and communications technology (ICT) environments and tools in their working practices. Typically a group of eprofessionals conducts their collaborative work through the use of collaborative working environments (CWE).

The CWE concept refers to online collaboration (i.e. virtual teams, mass collaboration, massively distributed collaboration ), online communities of practice, such as the open source community, and open innovation principles.