What is a Groupware?

What is a Groupware?
Groupware is collaboration software, that is software that helps workgroups and teams work together to accomplish group assignments.

Groupware is a fast-growing category of general purpose application software that combines a variety of software features and functions to facilitate collaboration. For example, groupware products like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchanges, and Netscape Communicator support collaboration through electronic mail, discussion groups and databases, scheduling, task management, data, audio and video conferencing.

Groupware products are changing in several ways to meet the demand for better tools for collaboration. Groupware in now designed to use internet and corporate internet and extranets to make collaboration possible in a global scale by virtual teams located anywhere in the world.

For example, team members might use the Internet for global E-mail, project discussion forums, and joint Web page development. Or they might use corporate intranets to publish project news and progress reports, and work jointly on documents stored on Web servers.

Collaborative capabilities are also being added to other software to give them groupware features. For examples, in the Microsoft Office software suite, Microsoft World keep track of who made revisions to each document, Excel tracks all changes made to a spreadsheet, and Outlooks lets you keep track of tasks you delegate to other team members.
What is a Groupware?