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2 Due to behavior evolution and technology progress, collaboration with customer communities becomes an important part of company transformation. This article aims at enhancing virtual community management with a 3D model of choice of collaboration. It fills the gap between collaboration practices recommended in the literature and the reality of Web 2.0 collaborative tools use and interest measured in a sample of 99 large companies. A functional analysis and the classification of 18 Web 2.0 tools triggered a tri-dimensional model of e-collaboration identifying major utilizations: value addition, member satisfaction, and flexibility of frontiers. Moreover, a large company survey identified that two types of companies were opposed to e-collaboration with customers and that three were favorable with different aims and tools. Our findings underline that e-collaboration seems interesting if the "value creation" dimension was positive and if "member satisfaction" and "flexible frontiers" dimensions were positive at the same time. Otherwise, customer communities are not perceived as an opportunity. This research offers practitioners a managerial model to support their transformation targets with suited distance practices and tools. It triggers theoretical evolutions with the concept of flexible frontiers.

Our paper responds to the need of an Aided Virtual Team Building System (Aided VTB System). It focuses on virtual teams that are active in virtual design projects in the area of New Product Development (NPD). An extract of requirements of this Aided VTB System is presented that is based on the idea of Quality Function Development and its tool "house of quality". The fulfillment of the demand of the requirements by appropriate relevant and recent concepts and techniques as solutions is discussed with help of a sample survey of 34 virtual team leaders. One of the outcomes of the Aided VTB System is to provide recommendations, guidelines and even best practices to take a choice of web 2.0 tools and concepts and techniques in the domain of competence management.

Abstract. This research highlights the differences of the adoption of collaborative tools between one European and one emerging country in Asia. Based on the Adaptive Structuration Theory and the Technology Spirit concept, it uses a three dimensional model focused on both internal and external collaboration. 18 tools were surveyed in a sample of 75 managers of large companies with more than 1000 employees. The results show a wider external collaboration in the emerging country, particularly in the dimensions of actor's satisfaction and flexible frontier. Internal collaboration is more developed in both countries, but mainly in the dimension of value creation. The paper illustrates and adapts the theory in a high tech web 2.0 environment. Managerial implications are suggested in collaboration practices and measurements.