We report on our experiences of introducing an instant messaging and group chat application into geographically distributed workgroups. We describe a number of issues we encountered, including privacy concerns, individual versus group training, and focusing on teams or individuals. The perception of the tool's utility was a complex issue, depending both on users' views of the importance of informal communication, and their perceptions of the nature of cross-site communication issues. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of critical mass, which is related to the features each user actually uses. More generally, we encountered a dilemma that imposes serious challenges for user-centered design of groupware systems.

We report on our experiences of introducing an instant messaging and group chat application into geographically distributed workgroups. We describe a number of issues we encountered, including privacy concerns, individual versus group training, and focusing on teams or individuals. The perception of the tool's utility was a complex issue, depending both on users' views of the importance of informal communication, and their perceptions of the nature of cross-site communication issues. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of critical mass, which is related to the features each user actually uses. More generally, we encountered a dilemma that imposes serious challenges for user-centered design of groupware systems.

The goal of the work presented in this paper is to identify ways to improve the speed, efficiency and quality with which a distributed development team develops their product and delivers it to market. We are working closely with a distributed product team at Lucent Technologies in order to ensure that our efforts are based on the needs of an existing distributed organization. Interviews have been conducted with members of this organization which have revealed a number of problems which affect distributed groups. Some of the problems identified were: the lack of tools to share data during meetings, insufficient organizational information, lack of knowledge concerning who was responsible for each module of the system, lack of any informal, unplanned, encounters/meetings between the distributed sites, and lack of presence information; e.g. in today or on holiday, for distant colleagues.The focus of the work presented in this paper is to provide tools, which allow this virtual community to have more informal/impromptu encounters based on knowledge of distant colleagues' presence. We believe that this will help the distributed group begin to feel more like a team, and will substantially lower the cost of initiating communication with someone at a remote site. Currently, it is difficult and time consuming to get hold of someone because there is no way to tell if they are available, or if they are momentarily away from their desks, or in the midst of a crisis, or away on vacation, or if the other site is closed for a holiday. For co-located team members, this sort of information is provided by local knowledge and by signals such as closed doors, so it is much easier, and takes much less time, to contact a colleague. Informal communication plays a critical role in project coordination, and facilitating informal communication across sites can be expected to significantly reduce the problems of multi-site development.The tools have two main thrusts -presence detection and communications. Presence cues are primarily detected by computer or telephony activity, as well as information provided directly by the user. Communications capabilities range from text chat, audio conferencing to video conferencing. In addition, these tools attempt to use information stored in disparate places, including the corporate intranet and the software configuration management system. It is hoped that these links to various forms of institutional memory will help to provide not just information about an individual's presence and location, but help to suggest which individual to contact for answers or help.

The Personal Presence System (PPS) is an experimental research prototype platform to support advanced broadband applications, including multimedia conferencing and distance learning. It supports the user's presentation control of advanced network elements (multimedia bridges). The multimedia bridge provides for a single contact point per user, who receives only one combined video stream, which minimizes access bandwidth. This architecture solves the N -squared transmission problem of multipoint video conferencing and makes customer terminal equipment simpler and cheaper than high-end desktop workstations. The PPS provides each user with flexible presentation control of a feature-rich video bridge. The PPS also supports advanced features such as object extraction and multimedia object associations.

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