Automated Capture and Access of Virtual Meetings in TeamSpace

1. Automated Capture and Access of Virtual Meetings in TeamSpace November 14, 2001 CNRC, Columbia University Werner Geyer, Shahrokh Daijavad, Tom Frauenhofer IBM T.J. Watson Research Heather Richter, Gregory Abowd Georgia Institute of Technology Ludwin Fuchs, Steven Poltrock The Boeing Company

2. Agenda • TeamSpace project • Tasks and work modes • Automated capture and access • TeamSpace system • Initial experiences

3. Inter-Company Collaboration

4. TeamSpace Project • Investigate how technology can enable teams to work together effectively across time and space • Collaborative, task-oriented workspace system to support inter-company distributed teams (“Team Portal”) • Management of shared work processes and artifacts in a project • Synchronous and asynchronous team interaction • Support virtual meetings as a crucial team activity

5. Problems and Opportunities • Security infrastructures prevent collaboration: - No collaboration without communication • Different places, different companies, different cultures, different work processes: - Design implications • Work filled with rich discussions whose details are difficult to document: - Ubiquitous capture is an opportunity!

6. Boeing Studies • Team members spend the majority of their time with articulation work • Team members frequently shift between different work modes and perform different tasks

7. Work Modes

8. Work Modes and Tasks

9. Fluidity People move effortlessly from one mode to another when collocated

10. Motivation for Capture and Access • Work filled with rich discussions whose details are difficult to document and later access • Virtual meetings are a crucial communication and coordination activity of teams • Ubiquitous capture and access technologies could provide inexpensive capture of these discussions (archiving) • After a decade of research in capture and access systems, we still do not understand the impact on everyday work practices

11. Research Questions • What is the best way to capture meetings? • How are the users going to utilize captured information? • What are the appropriate browsing and visualization mechanisms for the captured material? • How do these differ depending on the task of the user? Getting answers ... ... involves putting a system into real use and capture a critical mass of meetings.

12. Approach • Integration of Capture and Access into a collaborative teamenvironment • Using articulation objects across synchronous and asynchronous types of collaboration • Creating indices based on user interaction with these articulation objects Benefits: • Automated documentation (archiving) • Help build relevant knowledge of past team activities • Efficient browsing of meeting records

13. Work Modes and Tasks

14. Capture and Access in TeamSpace General meeting artifacts: Meetings, Agendas, Action Items, Presentations, People System Components: • Web UI:Create, view, and edit any object before, during, and after a meeting • MeetingClient:Conduct and automatically record and index distributed meetings • MeetingViewer: Review captured meeting information and use significant events to play back desired portions • Meeting- and application server

15. Web UI Workspace Tabs List View Detailed View

16. Web UI Calendar View Edit a Meeting

17. Web UI Search Parameters Meeting List

18. MeetingClient Main View Overview Panel Toolbar

19. MeetingClient

20. MeetingViewer MeetingViewer Timelines Event Key Information Panels Target icon

21. MeetingViewer Event type & color Location of Playback Show event Event

22. System Architecture

23. Initial Usage Used for weekly meetings by TeamSpace development team since November 2000 • Cross firewall communication is difficult! • We shared information using PowerPoint • We reviewed brainstorming, presentations, and action items to some extent • Still problems in awareness of what distributed members are looking at or doing • Led to redesign of MeetingClient and Web Interface – the 2nd prototype was completed early July

24. Cross-Firewall Approaches (1) HTTP Tunneling Sametime/NetMeeting

25. Cross-Firewall Approaches(2) Future Solution TeamSpace

26. Conclusion • Meeting capture and access needs to be integrated within the larger context of work • TeamSpace is our first attempt at such an integration • Using articulation objects across synchronous and asynchronous types of collaboration • Create indices based on user interaction with these articulation objects • TeamSpace can now serve as a platform for evaluations to understand the impact of meeting capture and access

27. Info • http://www.research.ibm.com/teamspace/ • Publications: ACM Ubicomp, IEEE WetIce, IBM RC, …