Support for collaboration between large and small & medium enterprises

Collaboration between large and small & medium enterprises is still not adequately supported by current groupware solutions. In this paper, we present the VENIS approach for lightweight collaboration that addresses the challenges of inter-enterprise collaboration. Key elements of our approach are interoperability to legacy applications, basic services for sharing and management of shared collaboration spaces, use of email for collaboration on the SMEs side and the application of lightweight semantic technologies to enable semantic search in inter-enterprise collaborations. We tested the approach on a use case from software development and describe the results.