Problems in Distributed Collaboration for a Knowledge Worker

• Separation of people, data and conferencing tools
• Transition overhead between different working modes
• Tradeoff between privacy vs. awareness
  

Solutions

• Integrated project-specific presence information (people), project-specific documents (data) and light-weight conferencing tools into a single virtual place

• Less effort to start an ad hoc conversation

• Explicit model for separate private and public spaces-Explicit entry/exit to/from WorkLounge
  

Key Features

• Built on top of SharePoint team site
• AV based on RTC APIs
• Supports multi-party audio
• Common audio channel
• Event-based recording for easy off-line viewing and archiving of presentations