Supporting distributed meetings using cooperative, visual, process-enabled hypermedia

This work tries to bring hypermedia out of our multiple research-oriented cooperative hypermedia systems into the kinds of systems people in the real world can use. Meeting support for distributed teams is one of these and process support is another. The practical challenges include how to develop a (whiteboard-like) structure-rich visual hypermedia space that is accessible from the Web, how to integrate Microsoft office applications into the system for managing documents in a (visual hypermedia represented) meeting process, and how to set up A/V and application sharing connections easily for all the meeting participants. The system described in this paper has been used in three use cases and initial feedback indicates that it has successfully addressed several such practical challenges.