Enabling inter-company team collaboration

Collaboration across different companies at different geographical locations has become a business necessity. We are building a system called TeamSpace that integrates different types of collaboration technologies into an environment that supports inter-company teams. Enabling inter-company collaboration is still a challenge because security infrastructures are in place to prevent the flow of information. We report our experiences in using existing technologies to enable the inter-company collaboration of our own project team. We describe our initial approaches to the problem and explain why they failed. Based on the lessons learned, we built a TeamSpace prototype using an architecture that allowed us to collaborate across existing security infrastructures.