A virtual workspace for distributed design and engineering tasks

The development and production of consumer goods is increasingly affected by a world-wide distribution and specialization of development and production locations. Efficient IT tools are required for synchronizing decision makers, developer teams and production planners. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of our virtual workspace for supporting the collaboration of team members in geographically distributed locations. Our contribution focuses on the support for real-time collaboration in the design and engineering field but addresses also some aspects of offline collaboration.