Integrating workflow and groupware functionalities for co-operating small and medium sized enterprises: a case study

The concept of virtual enterprises has become very popular as this organisational form seems to fit well to the turbulent global economic environment of present days. As a virtual enterprise consists of independent members, efficient collaboration among them is crucial to the proper functioning of this business formation. To achieve this level of collaboration both groupware and workflow functionality are needed at the multi-organisational level. We describe our solution for groupware and workflow integration which fulfills the special needs of virtual enterprises made up of small and medium sized enterprises. Our starting point is a multi-organisational groupware solution, based upon which we provide additional multi-organisational workflow functionality. We follow WfMC and W3C standards whenever possible throughout the project.