Electronic Meetings - CSCW and GDSS

What is Object Lens ?

• a groupware system that support asynchronous communication
• a knowledge-based environment for developing cooperative work application

Features

• Object-oriented database

  Knowledge about companies, people, tasks, meeting and products
  are represented by objects
  

• Folders
  1. Folders are created for objects of the same types
     
  2. Users can customize their own display of objects in a folder
     by selecting fields to be displayed in table form or in tree form
     
  3. Tables show the value of selected fields from the objects
     
  4. Trees show the links between objects in the folder
     

• Rule-based Agents
  1. Rule-based agents can be created easily by users to process information automatically
     eg. sorting new mail messages into different folders
     
  2. Agents can be triggered by events or by users
     
  3. When an agent is triggered, it applies a set of rules to
     specified collection of objects such as new mail messages
     
  4. If an object satisfies the criteria specified in a rule,
     specific actions will be triggered
     eg. moving urgent mail messages to a specific folder
     

• Rules
  1. A rule contains an IF field and a THEN field
  2. The IF part describes a set of instances of fields
  3. The THEN part describes the action
  4. Instead of looking at information contained in the object, Object lens can draw information from other objects.
     

  These features can be combined to create a variety of cooperative
  work applications.
  

Applications

• Task Tracking
  1. Requests and commitments are messages stored in a folder.
  2. They can be sorted by the performer and the related project
  3. Group members can summarize messages by displaying specific fields.

• Engineering Changes Notices
  1. The process involves disseminating information about changes in
     product specification to the appropriate people in an organization.
     
  2. Users can sort change notices by fields such as part affected,
     type of change.
     
  3. In addition to this, users can select all change notices that
     involve a particular manager.