Haifa, Israel - 11 Mar 2002: IBM Haifa, Fraunhofer SIT of Germany and five other European Commission companies are partnering to develop UNITE – a Ubiquitous and Integrated Teamwork Environment.
UNITE focuses on helping groups of people working at different geographic locations to collaborate as a team—just as easily and naturally as they would if they were working in the same room. The project, approved by the European Commission’s 5th framework, formally kicked off last year with a total worth of 2.5 million euros in funding. The European Commission (EC) funds special projects that they feel will benefit the entire EC.
The idea is to use existing technologies beneath a unified interface for using different collaborative tools. For example, using UNITE you can go into the team calendar, click on one of the meetings scheduled and see the entire list of documents or media related to that meeting.
"UNITE proposes the paradigm of a boundary-less office space, where physical and virtual offices seamlessly blend together," explains Pnina Vortman, manager of Services Technologies who is running the UNITE project in IBM Haifa. "We'll be providing a transparent infrastructure for both wireless/mobile and wired/fixed communications, where resources of the real and the virtual office are managed and utilized concurrently and efficiently."
The four technology partners are Fraunhofer SIT of Germany, IBM Research, ADETTI of Portugal, and Steria of France. Coventry University will contribute the graphic design, while Fraunhofer IAO will provide the business requirements and evaluation. IBM France will coordinate the project and PentaScope will disseminate the final product.
IBM Haifa will contribute a communication and collaboration middleware that will hide the specific implementations and enable multiple devices ranging from telephones to computers to wireless devices on multiple protocols to communicate and collaborate. People will not have to master communications technologies, as the framework will be able to determine the availability of people and their communication channels, and intelligently route the communication session according to the recipient's preferences. Integration with smart calendars and personalized profiles will enable the system to 'know' the real-time state (i.e. whether they are free or busy and the geographic location) of team members, as well as their preferences such as favorite bookmarks, communities of interest and whether they like to receive notification by e-mail, phone or other means.
IBM expects that the project results will highly influence the application of information technology at work, including a dramatic expansion of collaboration through virtual organizations to leverage the as yet unexploited potential of the rich fabric of European subject matter experts and the emerging world population of individual and micro-enterprises.
"We feel the project addresses many social and environmental issues of the modern economy," notes Vortman. IBM Research also sees this as an opportunity to develop other projects in the area of knowledge management, and sees this as a potential key service to be offered by ASPs (Application Service Providers) to companies as well as being used by other EC cross-organization projects to effectively work as virtual teams.
“Although the environment is virtual, the resulting team collaboration is very real,” explains Vortman.
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