Technologies of time- and location-independent telecooperation in interactive and multimedia applications

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) introduces new technologies, meant to support people in their needs to communicate and to exchange information. CSCW group-supporting systems and applications will become more important over the next years, especially due to the increasing number of interconnected computers, ISDN, high speed networks, and networking environments. After a short introduction to CSCW, this paper will give a perspective of the state of the art of CSCW itself. This includes a description of conferencing, CSCW tools, multimedia collaboration, multimedia mail and multimedia image communication as examples for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Also video and audio communicatio is focused on. Furthermore three different application fields are discussed and finally future trends for CSCW are given.