Shared XML documents in service centers of the future

Call centers are at the core of today's customer relations management. Increasingly, they are also utilized internally as competence and knowledge centers. Turning them into service centers of the future (SCotF) requires parallel communication over several channels, including Internet services, in a distributed synchronous fashion. In this paper, we show that the emerging XML standards provide a good basis for this type of interaction. In turning e-service into a groupware application, we propose to apply a spatial awareness model to assist in the collaboration. We demonstrate that it can be integrated into the XML/XSL-framework. The results are compared with a previous solution, which applied proprietary tools. Questions of fidelity and a critique of the existing standards and tools complement the practical results.