Members of distributed workgroups (Virtual Organizations, VO) need tools to improve the communication among them. A great number of Web-based tools are available, some of them for free. This evaluation can help you to find the most suitable tools for your collaboration needs.

Results

The most urgent requirements of VO members are:

• document sharing,
• organization of on-line meetings and
• management of distributed projects.

The preliminary survey and the evaluations showed that it is not possible to select a single tool able to cover all needs.
Read more in the project report.

The project "Vorprojekt TINA" takes the results of this project into account and will define a tool(set) for the specific VO needs in living labs.

Initial Position

The tools customarily used for collboration/communication purposes include e-mail, telephone, fax and Web sites. New web-based tools are now available: Wiki, blogs, remote storage space, tools for collaborative editing of documents, social networks etc. Sometimes VO members do not use the most suited tools but they use the tools they are already acquainted with. Sometimes they don't use modern tools at all.

Goals

The purposes of this project are:

• to assess the needs of members of virtual organisatizations (VO),
• to identify similar evaluations of VO support tools within the Swiss academic community,
• to evaluate Web-based collaboration tools for VO, in order to get to know the available products and therefore
• to be able to give advice to users about the most suitable tools for their collaboration needs.

This study could be the foundation for pilot projects that will investigate on the field the effectiveness of these tools.
Supported by the most appropriate tools, virtual organizations members will be able to pursue most effectively their goals.