In order to support knowledge workers and communities of practice,
portals offer additional functionality for distributed meetings, shared
workspaces, telephone and video conferencing and dissemination or exchange
of artifacts such as presentations or text documents used in meetings.
Moreover, an agenda could allow members graphic access to events and
happenings. Collaborating members can also use real-time chat applications.
Open topics, formed groups, the identity of discussion participants and events
in real time can be browsed graphically with hypertext and visual maps. Also,
instant messaging is a well-known and powerful collaboration tool for real-
time meeting support.