CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Formal Video Program
A Tour of TeamRooms
Mark Roseman and Saul Greenberg
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Calgary
Calgary, Alta, Canada T2N 1N4
Tel: +1-403-220-3532
E-mail: roseman, saul@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
ABSTRACT
TeamRooms is a groupware environment based on the metaphor of shared virtual rooms.
The system contains user-defined rooms, each with a shared whiteboard, chat tool
and customizable groupware applets. The system also supports a number of features
to help maintain awareness, as well as a rich persistence mechanism that can act as a group
memory.
KEYWORDS
Groupware, CSCW, shared electronic spaces
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
INTRODUCTION
Many groupware systems today are based on the metaphor of a meeting or telephone call,
where users connect to each other, interact with a shared tool, and then disconnect,
ending the interaction. Here we describe TeamRooms, a groupware system based on the
metaphor of a shared space.
A physical team room is a shared space that can be used by a group for more than just
meetings. Members of the group can perform individual work in the room, while taking
advantage of equipment, documents and other artifacts that the team can permanently
store there. The room serves as an archive of the group's work, and a convenient locale
to leave materials for other team members.
Our TeamRooms system [2] uses the Internet to bring similar benefits to teams who
are not physically co-located and therefore cannot share a physical space. Network
servers can host a number of different rooms for a single community. Group members
use TeamRooms to connect to these servers to interact with the rooms and each other.
USER INTERFACE
Figure 1 shows the user interface of TeamRooms. The large window represents a single
shared room. The other windows show (top to bottom): the rooms available on the TeamRooms
server (for navigating between rooms), the connected users (to see who is currently around), and a business card (for more information on one user).
Figure 1. TeamRooms user interface.
Standard Room Tools
One of our goals in building TeamRooms was to integrate a number of techniques for
supporting awareness of other collaborators [1]. For example, telepointers within
the application support gesturing. Idle indicators and periodic video snapshots give
a sense of whether collaborators are attending to the work area. A radar view (top left
of figure) provides a miniature of the entire room, which may be much larger than
a user's view, and allows other users' gestures, locations, and manipulations of
the applets to be tracked, even in a relaxed-WYSIWIS situation.
The bulk of the room is occupied by a shared whiteboard, supporting freehand sketching
and text. Along the bottom is a textual chat tool provided for when voice connections
are not available. Other controls particular to this room are along the left.
Applets
A number of special purpose groupware tools called applets can be embedded into the
room. These applets allow a room to be customized according to the specific needs
of the group using it. Some of the applets supplied with TeamRooms include:
- a database for holding address books, project task lists, etc.
- a tool to upload or download files
- a simple text editor for leaving short notes
- a concept map tool for organizing ideas
- a place to display images
- a tool to leave a URL for others
Group Memory
As with a real-life shared space, any objects placed in a room remain there, and are
available the next time the room is entered. TeamRooms goes one better than this
and keeps a detailed history of the changes in the room over time. Users can retrieve
earlier versions of either individual applets or the complete room. Activities in a room
are preserved as part of the group's memory, which can provide valuable information
about the evolution of an idea or artifact.
CONCLUSIONS
TeamRooms has currently been in use for almost a year, with users located throughout
North America, Europe, and New Zealand. We have found the shared spaces metaphor
very effective for supporting collaborations. Most of the interactions we have seen
have been asynchronous, typically people commenting on others' work. However, TeamRooms
afforded many casual real-time interactions, when people connected to the server
at the same time, saw each other and initiated conversation.
Status
TeamRooms is based on the Tcl/Tk language and our groupware toolkit GroupKit [3]. It runs on Macintosh, Windows 95/NT, and
a wide variety of Unix platforms. It works over either dedicated networks or modem connections,
and requires no special hardware. For other papers, related information and projects, and for details on obtaining the software distribution, see
our World Wide Web pages:
http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/projects/grouplab/teamrooms/
Note: Our "TeamRooms" system is completely independent of the "TeamRoom"
product from Lotus Development Corporation.
REFERENCES
1. Gutwin, C., Greenberg, S. and Roseman, M.
Supporting awareness of others in groupware
(short paper suite). In ACM CHI '96 Conference Companion.
1996.
2. Roseman, M. and Greenberg, S. TeamRooms: Network places for collaboration. In Proc. of ACM CSCW '96
. 1996.
3. Roseman, M. and Greenberg, S. Building Real Time Groupware with GroupKit, a Groupware
Toolkit. ACM TOCHI.
March, 1996.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Formal Video Program
