Background

Teamwork is an integral part of today’s work environment as much more can be achieved from the coordinated contributions of people with diverse backgrounds and resources than from those same people working independently. This is especially true for the development of complex systems that require a large work breakdown structure, such as aircraft and other aerospace systems. More and more, large development projects consist of people from different companies at different geographical locations, which makes the coordination of team activities difficult because of reduced team cohesion and limited awareness of team members’ activities. Computer support for distributed teams has focused on either improving communication in synchronous distributed meetings or on providing tools to facilitate distributed asynchronous collaboration, but not both.

Overview

Boeing and IBM are jointly developing a framework and prototype, called TeamSpace, to support spatially distributed teamwork in a more holistic and integrated manner. TeamSpace is a web-based collaborative workspace system for managing shared work processes and maintaining shared artifacts in a project typically spanning months or years. It covers both synchronous and asynchronous cross-company team activities and provides a seamless transition between different work modes of team members, such as individual, social and meeting modes. The activities people perform depend on their current work mode. TeamSpace provides a task-oriented workspace that adapts to the current mode. The key to highly efficient teamwork is continuous awareness of each other’s activities and timely communication, which is relatively easy to achieve for physically collocated teams. Computer-support for virtually collocated teams can provide awareness functions to remote team members. However, these functions are mostly limited to the desktop, which makes them inefficient in many situations. TeamSpace also attempts to increase team awareness and communication for distributed teams by providing ubiquitous access through the integration of wireless handheld devices.

Meetings are a crucial communication and coordination activity of teams. While computer support for distributed conferences has been investigated, meetings involve much more than the synchronous act of discussion.  Meetings relate to all of the various activities of a team, from reporting and scheduling tasks, to raising and debating issues, to reviewing documents.  TeamSpace supports distributed meetings as a part of a larger collaborative work process.  We are doing this by providing capture, integration and access capabilities for distributed meetings. Captured synchronous information is integrated with other related information in TeamSpace, enabling users to efficiently gain knowledge of both current and past team activities. 

Research Directions

We are investigating how technology can enable teams to work together more efficiently across time and distance. The goal of TeamSpace is to support team coordination but not the specific development tasks of teams. Our research in the project currently emphasizes virtual meetings as an important communication activity of teams. We are investigating in time-based capture and access of virtual meetings and how the capture material can be efficiently used to support user groups with different requirements and contextual knowledge.Current research also focuses on the support of different work modes and the design of seamless transition technologies, and on the integration of wireless handheld devices in team support environments to increase interactivity and awareness of distributed teams. We have developed an initial prototype of the TeamSpace collaborative workspace system. The prototype is continuously extended to demonstrate the feasability of our ideas and serves as a basis for joint user studies.

TeamSpace Prototype System

The prototype we have developed consists of a TeamSpace server that is accessed with a standard Web browser, a number of conferencing clients for conducting and capturing virtual meetings and an access component for the captured material called MeetingViewer.

The Web interface is the standard entry point into the system. It is used to perform user authentication and to create, edit, share, and delete persistent articulation objects. The interface also provides access to ongoing synchronous meetings and to the meeting records of completed and captured meetings. A graphical room map indicating other team members’ activities facilitates easy switching from individual, asynchronous types of work to synchronous meetings or social interactions and enhances team awareness.  Click on the following image to see an enlarged version of TeamSpace's Web interface.

Users can select completed meetings in TeamSpace and launch a MeetingViewer to view and playback these meetings.  We are using a general-purpose access interface to investigate visualizations and browsing mechanisms for captured meetings. Click on the following image to see an enlarged version of MeetingViewer.
 

Architecture and Implementation

The TeamSpace virtual meeting prototype system is a Web-based client-server multi-user system that additionally uses a conferencing server and several synchronous clients to capture virtual meetings. The following figure depicts a rough overview of the system architecture.
 
 

The TeamSpace server consists of a Java-enabled Web server with servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP) to handle data storage, retrieval, manipulation and presentation. We use a conferencing server to establish synchronous conferencing sessions and to broadcast the information between the conferencing clients. A dedicated conferencing client (Listener) on the server side records and time-stamps all the synchronous activities (events) during the meeting. TeamSpace data and meeting records are kept persistent by storing them on the local file system as XML files. On the client side, we are using standard Web browsers (supporting Javascript and Applets) to access the meeting environment and synchronous conferencing clients to conduct and capture virtual meetings. In order to make this system usable across companies’ firewalls, the TeamSpace server is required to reside outside a firewall. Clients either connect via HTTP or TCP if outbound TCP traffic is tolerated.