A Collaborative Engineering Environment

The need for a computer supported collaborative engineering environment to stay competitive has never been greater. There are two major technical challenges in computer supported group work: the environment and the collaborative applications integrated in these environments. The environment has to provide some services and to take care about the consistency and availability of data. The applications have to enable the product development team to share, discuss and realize ideas. In this paper, we describe such a collaborative engineering environment. We show some of the applications needed to establish cooperative work. We discuss briefly the neccessary technology and the related problems. Finally, we present a design application facilitating distributed, simultaneous design on a common model by different users.