<title>Framework solutions for complete collaborative environments</title>

Abstract

Collaboration of experts from different domains within an enterprise has always posed logistical and knowledge management challenges to managers and members of the collaboration. Scheduling meetings, arranging travel, getting data and information into the right hands at the right time all require time, money and energy that could be better spent on product development. Advances in information technology have made it easier to communicate to solve, or at least mitigate, some of these problems using e-mail, audio conferencing, and database management software, but a great detail of human intervention is still required to make these collaborations operate smoothly. Over the past ten years enterprises have come to require more than just total asset visibility and human communication capabilities. To design and field products better, faster and cheaper more human creativity and energy must be focused on the products and less on the operation of the collaboration. The collaborative environment solutions of the future must not only provide the communication and knowledge management that exist today, but also provide seamless access to resources and information, product and process modeling and the advanced decision support that results from the availability of necessary resources and information.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.