Working with Groupware : Understanding and Evaluating Collaboration Technology

This book looks at the social aspects of how virtual and geographically dispersed groups work together using information and communication tools (groupware).

It introduces the basic concepts and brings together ideas from various disciplines to provide an integrated approach to the evaluation and design of groupware technology.

The key topics include: why some collaboration technologies succeed and others fail; the conditions needed for successful distributed collaboration; and how to take a systematic, user-oriented, design-related approach to the evaluation of computer supported collaboration.

Primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Information and Communication Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, Communication Sciences, Human Factors, Interface Design and Multimedia Systems, this book will also be of interest to researchers, practitioners and lecturers in social and organisational sciences.