Designing a Generic Collaborative Working Environment

Groupware provides an essential support for the maintenance of knowledge management in many organizations. Accordingly, the use of groupware systems has become widespread. However, still some problems regarding the way in which business process are implemented exist, because they require the communication between several of these groupware systems to fulfill all required objectives in the organization. For that reason, interoperability issues have taken a vital role in the business sector. In this area, one of the leading technologies is the Web service standard. In this paper we describe the design of a generic collaborative working environment to provide the basis for allowing interoperability with several groupware systems. We also reflect how Web services technologies are used in the design of this environment.