IT C515 CSCW - Assignment 1 Summery

The mid-sized health care firm has most of its employees in the headquarter but for direct marketing there are 500 employees all over the country. The current infrastructures of the company only allow them to make communication via email. But if an employee want to access any file from the company there is no facility for that.

Therefor for such kind of collaborative work there are different kind of groupware softwares available on the market. From those we will compare two products and select one which fits for the company.

Microsoft Sharepoint
SharePoint refers to a combination of three Microsoft products and technologies that facilitate collaboration within an organization and with partners and customers. Sharepoint Services offers basic web portal and intranet functionality, team, document or project sub-sites, version-controlled document storage, and a basic search functionality. It works in conjunction with Microsoft Office’s SharePoint Portal Server and Project Server so that users can easily create, manage, and build collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout an organization, or with trading partners.

If we try to see the price of Microsoft Sharepoint it is very pricey. To get detail information about the cost of Microsoft share point use the following links.

• http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6350_11-5975781.html
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx

BSCW
The Basic Support for Collaborative Work (BSCW) system supports collaboration by providing shared workspaces over the Web. A shared workspace allows storage and retrieval of documents and sharing information within a group. This functionality is integrated with an event mechanism to provide each user with an awareness of the activities of others within the workspace. BSCW comprises numerous features, for example, support for threaded discussions, version management of documents, group management and search features. The system is designed primarily to support self-organizing groups, it is fully platform independent application. In addition to that if we try to see the cost for BSCW is a fair price. For detail price information:

• http://www.bscw.de/english/bscw_hosting.html
• http://www.bscw.de/english/bscw_server.html

Conclusion
Both the above mentioned softwares are very well developed and has a lot of features to facilitate collaborative works in groups or organizations. Regardless of this fact, for the company mentioned above with 500 marketing employees in the country, I believe BSCW will solve the current problem of

• Sharing and searching office documents
• Document status information (e.g. update of documents)
• Easy access for external users (i.e. sales people)
• Easy administration and moderate costs

Even if Microsoft share point is a very good software it is very expensive, complicated to handle, very vast for mid-size firm and also it has a lot of administrative cost. In addition to that to run sharepoint at least the company has to have Microsoft windows server 2003 to get MS Sharepoint services, which offers medium functionally by itself. It needs MS Sharepoint Portal Server to get the full functionally which cost a lot of money. Therefore in my opinion sharepoint will be applicable for big-size companies which has at least more than a thousand or two thousand employees all over the world.

Just to give a little comparison between
Microsoft Sharepoint Vs. BSCW

	Sharepoint	BSCW
User Management	Restrictive	Flexible
End user customization	Flexible but complicated	Limited front end customization
Extensibility	Web services (SOAP)API (web parts)	Web services (xml)API (packages)
Workspace structure	Extensions have to be built / bought for advanced structures	Clear hierarchical, intuitive
Content structure	Predefined content types, extensible	File based

IT C515 CSCW - Reading for Week 3

• J. Grundin: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: History and Focus
• What factors and developments led to the establishment of the area of CSCW?
  
  
• In the mid 1970s Office Automation (OA) was introduced to help/support groups and organizations in an interactive way. OA also tried to extend and integrate single-user application by adding software’s like word processors and spreadsheets.
  
  But still OA was not as much as expected for solving problems of collaborative work in a group or organization. Therefore CSCW started as an effort by technologists to learn a group activity from economists, social psychologists, and anyone who has experience on group active so that it will help to establish a proper tool to facilitate a group work.
  
  In addition to that there are some factors like needing additional application while conducting a group activity such as desk-top and video conferencing system, email, electronic meeting rooms and real time network conferencing. So more or less the above some factors has some impact to the establishment of CSCW.
  
  
• What are the differences between US and EU research traditions in CSCW?

• American and European approaches to CSCW overlap but have marked differences. These partially reflect the small-system/product development and large- system/internal development distinction.

  If we try to see some differences between the US and EU regarding research traditions is CSCW,

  • US computer industry research labs and industry support for universities are very influential, research and developments are more intertwined where as in Europe case more research is government sponsored and activity focuses on large scale systems development, often in user organizations.
  • US researchers and developers focus on experimental, observational, and sociological data where as European researchers focus on philosophy or by social, economic, or political theory.
  • And also there is even a different understanding of a sentence or a word in these two countries. For example an American used the “task analysis” term to describe a cognitive task analysis based on experimental interface testing, a standard practice in human-computer interface studies. On the other hand the European used the same term meant an organizational task analysis based on mapping the flow of information from person to person. He thought the term was "nonsensical" in an experimental setting.
  • In European CSCW cultural norms are reflected. Such as national homogeneity, code determination laws, strong trade unions and extensive social welfare systems. But in the American CSCW they do not reflect much on cultural norms.
  • In Europe, conferences are often gatherings of professionals to interact and share current results; most of those who attend also present. In the US, a conference is often organized for a larger audience, with greater emphasis on polished results. This difference leads to misunderstandings over submission requirements.
    
    
  Therefore basically the above five points can be mentioned as some of the differences between US and EU research traditions in CSCW.
  
  
• J. Nunamaker: Collaborative Computing: The Next Millenium
• What does Nunamaker tell about the role of anonymity in groupware systems?
  
  
• Basically anonymity can help collaborative computing is such a way that by giving a freedom of expression for group member about a given project anonymously and contribute back to the group. This kind of method can help a project leader or manager to get to the desired goal faster and efficiently with the help of all anonymous group members. Anonymity can also help to establish team-oriented thinking. Even though anonymity can help a collaborative work with a great deal it can also be misused by individuals. For example as Mr. Nunamaker says
  
  “A person wanting to harass a co-worker might submit a dumb idea and append to it the name of the person he wants to antagonize.”
  
  Therefore to avoid such negative behavior giving a proper education and feedback, and also telling to the individual such behavior can slow down the collaborative process, can be solved or minimized.
  
  In general even though anonymity might seem strange for the first time users, when they start using it they will learn the effect of freedom of anonymity to the corporative work, they will start to appreciate the idea. And they also “must learn to use the freedom of anonymity responsibly.” (Nunamaker)
  

IT C515 CSCW - Reading for Week 2

What are the major differences between collocated and distant work? Why does "distance matter"?

• Well in the collocated work case it easy for the workers to meet and talk about the work progress or anything because they are physically at the same place and time. And they can manage to solve any kind of problems or arguments they encounter on the spot. But when we come to the distant work, it is a bit difficult to achieve the above points because peoples (workers) are located in different places on the world. That means there is very big difference between places by time zone, culture, weather, and many more. So it is difficult to achieve a better working environment and achieve the desired goal on specific time in projects with has different location in the world. But still in some extent it can be managed a little bit, by using technology like, email, telephone, video conference, and others.
  
  
• Distance matters because it is hard to manage differences in different places. Even with the help of technology it is still difficult to manage a team in Africa and in USA. First there is a problem of Time Zone, for example when the team in Africa finishes there works and try to go to home in the other hand team in USA starts there day time. It will be hard to make a proper communication in the situations like this and even after solving this problem there might be no common ground for the topic they need to talk about, there also might be a weather, culture, and technology usage and infrastructure problems. So in general even in the 21th century for a project to be accomplished successfully the better choice is collected work but still distance can be managed in some extents.

What do you think: will it be possible to make distributed teams as efficient as collocated ones in the future?

• I can say it might be possible with the help of technology. Yes, now it is difficult to manage workers in different areas. But when we see the growth of technology from the past like 10 years we might hope for the future it might brought a solution for working in distance too. When email and video conferencing first introduced it doesn't look like it will actually be the part of everybody’s life nowadays. So for example providing a virtual room for all locations, or something like that might solve the problem.