Existing online collaboration tools and platforms provide
basic communications integration and the ability to include
some real-time information sources. For enterprise use
there are requirements for extending these tools with better
integration with existing intelligent communication
systems, simplifying the collaboration life cycle, enabling
the collaboration process, and being able to support longterm
collaborations in a variety of ways. We present a new
model for such a collaboration environment called
ConnectedSpaces. Like a number of existing systems,
ConnectedSpaces uses a collaboration space as the basic
construct. We present important feature sets of
ConnectedSpaces, including views, spaces as
communication endpoints, space persistence and
structuring, and a variety of types of embedded objects. We
then describe novel features of the ConnectedSpaces
framework, including space history, embedded gadgets
and robots, semantic processing, and integration with other
collaboration frameworks. Finally we illustrate specific
ConnectedSpaces functionality with examples from
experimental work.