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ERCIM News No.21 - April 1995 - GMD

PoliTeam - Telecooperation Across Distances in Space and Time

by Uta Pankoke-Babatz and Wolfgang Prinz

The goal of PoliTeam is the development of a telecooperation system which will help to overcome problems in work flow processing and of collaborative activities despite the spatial and timely distribution of the participants. In particular, the work in German ministries which are located in Bonn and Berlin should be facilitated.

PoliTeam is based on two Metaphors:

the common desk which can be accessed from different places. It allows to deposit documents on the common desk and to collaborate directly on them using the desk instead of complicate exchange of documents.
the electronic circulation folder. It incorporates the in-house messenger service and facilitates cooperative and coordinated work flows. An electronic circulation folder may contain any kind of documents. The rapid transport supports cooperation over long distances.

PoliTeam provides information about the events in the electronic world of common desks and circulation folders. These features will enable cooperation independent of time and location of the partners. Technical and organisational administration of this electronic world will be supported by PoliTeam with a particular management system. PoliTeam is a distributed system based on a client-server architecture.

The requirements of the application partners play a major role in the system development objectives. The requirements analysis is done on the basis of the actual use of the groupware product LinkWorks of Digital. For the ministries, it is important that individual steps in work-flow and the persons responsible for these steps are traceable in light of legal implications of these documents. To that end, electronic signatures, using SmartCard technology, are an important feature integrated into the system. Hand-written annotations on electronic documents are incorporated. Furthermore, integration of paper and electronic information will be catered for.

Developers from industry and research cooperate closely with the users from public administration and industry. This ensures that PoliTeam will be a marketable product, which considers innovative technologies and is adaptable to the practical requirements of current and future users.

The project is conducted by VW-Gedas (consortium leader), GMD's Institute for Applied Information Technology and the Institute for Computer Science of the University Bonn. The application partners are the German Ministry for Family Affairs, Seniors Citizens, Women and Youth in Bonn and in the Ministry of Justice of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The project is funded by the POLIKOM programme of the German Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology.

Please contact:
Wolfgang Prinz - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 27 30
E-mail: prinzgmd.de
Uta Pankoke-Babatz - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 2707
E-mail: pankokegmd.de

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