The design of an integrated group support environment

The proliferation of personal computers and communication networks, as well as the movement toward team-based organizations in the business world have generated tremendous interests in the development of group support systems (GSS). The authors present a research project to design and develop an integrated group support environment (IGSE) which provides a wide range of support for group works. IGSE is based on a conceptual framework of GSS and incorporates a set of unique features of several existing GSS. The primary goal of the IGSE is to provide an integrated, flexible, and cost-effective support for group communication, coordination, and decision making at any time and place in a multimedia environment. The kernel of IGSE is a groupware generator which is used to define the structure of a group repository, to generate a set of groupware tools for specific domains, and to specify group processes in managing coordination among team members. The architecture of the IGSE and the design of the groupware generator are presented