On The Trend of Groupware Research

그룹웨어 기술의 동향 분석에 관한 연구

Groupware is a new emerging research field, involving increasing numbers of institutions in the USA, Europe, and Asia such as Korea and Japan, etc., as an interdisciplinary research and development area with a strong computer science component. It grew from fairly unsystematic attempts by various developers to generate software that would increase the competence of people working together. This in turn was partly a response to: failures of and problems inherited from Office Automation and Management Information System ; some sociological intuitions about ways people might work together; and a search for uses of new interfacing, networking, and multi-media technologies. In this paper, groupware that has been configured to meet the needs of groups at work is defined as computer-based systems which support working groups of people engaged in common task in a shared environment. The basic concepts, origin, and historic research of the groupware are described. Specially, groupware relies on the approaches and contributions of many disciplines in computer science as well as sociology that is concerning human, social, and cultural activities. So, nine key disciplines of them upon which successful groupware depends are described briefly. Some state-of-the-art implementations and developments are reviewed through classifying and analyzing the current available groupware applications in the field or market.