Group formation and access rights management become crucial issues when shared workspaces are used to support flexible, emerging group work. End-Users should be able to form groups and adapt access rights to changing groups and workspaces. Current shared workspace systems do not support this sufficiently. Our approach combines a room metaphorbased shared workspace system with the key-metaphor for facilitating both, end-user controlled flexible group formation and end-user controlled access rights management. An evaluation of this approach with 290 users indicates that end-users can form groups and manage the access rights of their shared spaces.

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This paper introduces the concept of wiki templates that allows end-users to determine the structure and appearance of a wiki page. In particular, this better supports editing of structured wiki pages. Wiki templates may be adapted (defined and redefined) by end-users. They may be applied if found helpful, but need not to be used, thus maintaining the simple wiki editing way. In addition, we introduce a methodology to reuse wiki templates among different wiki instances. We show how wiki templates have been successfully used in real-world applications in our CURE wiki engine.

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Current CSCW applications support one or more modes of cooperative work. The selection of and transition between these modes is usually placed on the users. At IPSI we built the SEPIA cooperative hypermedia authoring environment supporting a whole range of situations arising during collaborative work and the smooth transitions between them. While early use of the system shows the benefits of supporting smooth transitions between different collaborative modes, it also reveals some deficits regarding parallel work, management of alternative documents, or reuse of document parts. We propose to integrate version support to overcome these limitations. This leads to a versioned data management and an extended user interface enabling concurrent users to select a certain state of their work, to be aware of related changes, and to cooperate with others either asynchronously or synchronously.