Groupware Tools for Asynchronous Collaboration in Academic Sector

While academics have continued to rely largely on email, numerous groupware products are now in use in many commercial environments, for example, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, IBM's WorkGroup, Novel's GroupWise, Collabra Share, etc. These systems typically integrate a number of tools for communication, workflow, database-sharing, contact management, and group scheduling, and operate across a variety of environments. In this paper, we survey a range of popular groupware tools that appear to be potentially useful in the academic sector. 1. Introduction Groupware is now a sizeable market sector dedicated to technological support for workgroups, a break with traditional computing which has always focused on the user as an individual whose data must be protected and isolated from other users. Groupware is about informationsharing, contact management (group diaries, etc.), group document management, workflow, and group communication. Most current tools support different-place, different-..