Overview
The UNITE– Ubiquitous and Integrated Teamwork Environment – project is designed to develop an environment for virtual workplaces. People who are spread out in a variety of locations will be able to work together on a project and really feel part of the same team.
UNITE will offer team members user-friendly, highly efficient, cooperative workplaces that pervasively, dynamically, securely, and transparently bind project context information to team members, their physical workplace, and their information tools. For example, virtual meeting rooms where the whole team sits together to tackle their project, and not even one of them has to be a technological whiz. UNITE is approved by the European Commission's 5th framework and involves seven partners. The four technology partners are GMD of Germany, IBM Haifa Research Labs, ADETTI of Portugal, and TECSI (Steria) of France. Coventry University will be contributing the graphic design, while Fraunhofer IAO are providing the business requirements and evaluation. IBM France will be coordinating the project and PentaScope will disseminate the final product. The project formally kicked off January 1, 2001 with a total worth of 2.5 Million Euro.
"UNITE proposes the paradigm of a boundary-less office space, where physical and virtual offices seamlessly blend together," explains Pnina Vortman who is managing the UNITE project in Haifa. "We'll be providing a transparent infrastructure for both wireless/mobile and wired/fixed communications, where resources of the real and the virtual office are managed and utilized concurrently and efficiently."
The contribution of the Haifa Research Labs is a communication and collaboration framework that will hide the specific implementations and will enable multiple devices ranging from telephones, computers to wireless devices on multiple protocols to communicate and collaborate. People will not need to know how to communicate with others, as the framework will be able to determine the availability of people and their communication channels, and intelligently route the communication session according to the recipient's preferences. Integration with smart calendars and personalized profiles will enable the system to 'know' the realtime state of team members, as well as their preferences.
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Real Teamwork – Bringing Two Worlds Together
UNITE will use existing technologies and create a layer that will provide a unified interface for using all these different tools, thereby creating teamwork for the people and for the tools. For example, today there is no intelligent support for cross organizational project calendars or even internal 'team calendars'. Right now, if one person uses Microsoft Outlook as their calendar tool, they cannot automatically share a common calendar with a second person who uses Netscape calendar or a Lotus Notes Calendar. Once a common project calendar becomes possible, any team member can be updated regarding project milestones, meetings, vacations, or out of office notices --even if their personal calendars are implemented using different tools.
The project will bring convergence of the physical and virtual workplaces through many different technologies including collaboration through video, communication, security, and access privileges. For example, say we request a virtual meeting room for ten people – where we have eight on location and two in remote locations. Each physical meeting room will set aside computers and team members will be updated as to how the room is furnished and what equipment is required for the meeting. This will be accomplished using smart conferencing and collaboration technologies for virtual meetings, and smart rooms for physical meetings.
"We expect the project results to highly influence the application of information technology at work, including a dramatic expansion of collaboration through virtual organizations to leverage the still not exploited potential of the rich fabric of European SMEs and the emerging world population of individual and micro-enterprises," notes Vortman. "We feel the project results will represent a major contribution to boost the European competitive edge, and address many social and environmental issues of modern economy."
Scoping Out the Product
Pentascope, one of the European Commission's 5th framework partners, will be performing the dissemination of UNITE. They are a consulting company that gives advice to firms on marketing e-business technologies, but they themselves are non-technical. Pentascope's primary communication mode is via cellular phone, so UNITE will direct their efforts towards wireless mobile personal devices rather than PCs or video. Deployment will be tailored to Pentascope's work.
IBM Haifa also sees this as an opportunity to develop other projects in the area of knowledge management, and may even use this teamwork technology in its move to a new building, which will involve teamwork between designers, architects, contractors, maintenance, etc. Additionally, they see this as a potential key service to be offered by ASPs (Application Service Providers) to companies as well as being used by other EC cross-organization projects to effectively work as virtual teams.
For more information, see the UNITE web site at: http://www.unite-project.org
