Service Orchestration for Collaboration Patterns

This article describes a structuring of groupware services that allows end users to orchestrate the provided services in order to match their collaboration patterns. Our approach is based on the notion that different forms of collaboration require different combinations of groupware services, and that these provided services are the most important aspect of a groupware system for its users. Based on an analysis of a series of high-level collaboration patterns from the healthcare domain we illustrate where flexibility in groupware service design is needed. The resulting structuring has been evaluated by experts using scenarios and has been implemented in a proof-of-concept demonstrator.