Collaborative work is characterized by frequently changing situations and corresponding demands for tool support and interaction behavior provided by the collaboration environment. Current approaches to address these changing demands include manual tailoring by end-users and automatic adaptation of single user tools or for individual users. Few systems use context as a basis for adapting collaborative work environments, mostly focusing on document recommendation and awareness provision. In this paper, we present, firstly, a generic four layer framework for modeling and exploiting context. Secondly, a generic adaptation process translating user activity into state, deriving context for a given focus, and executing adaptation rules on this context. Thirdly, a collaboration domain model for describing collaboration environments and collaborative situations. Fourthly, examples of exploiting our approach to support context-based adaptation in four typical collaboration situations: co-location, co-access, co-recommendation, and co-dependency.

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Distributed collaboration in a shared workspace involves flexible switching between emerging collaboration situations demanding appropriate technology support thus requiring modification of the shared workspace. We argue that manual tailoring creates large overhead for team members that can be reduced by employing our context-based adaptation approach. Six requirements for team-based adaptation of a shared workspace are defined, and it is shown how our context-based adaptation approach does address them and may lead to improving team interaction and collaboration by a better suited configuration of the shared workspace, and reducing the overhead for adaptation imposed on team members.