Supporting virtual meetings in the overall business context

Current distributed meeting support systems support meeting management, audio/video communication and application sharing. The modeling and the execution of meeting processes are usually not supported. Moreover, the overall business context of the meetings in an enterprise is missing. In this paper, a cooperative hypermedia system is presented, which provides jointly editable visual hypermedia artifacts in a distributed meeting. These visual hypermedia objects can be used for modeling meeting processes, handling external documents and application integration. In addition, the system provides process support for flexible meeting control and the invocation of communication tools, office tools, and groupware tools for specific meeting activities. More importantly, the meeting processes and their related information objects are modeled as part of the overall enterprise model such that they are placed in the overall business context of an enterprise. Use cases are provided to show how a distributed project team can perform many kinds of distributed meetings, while enjoying dedicated support for the planning, control, information management, and follow-up activities as integral parts of their business tasks.