They may be down the hall, across town, or around the world. While doing my e-mail today I was able to send a message to my colleagues in my own workgroup. Two of them are in England, one in France, six in Houston, two in Washington, two in Los Angeles, one in Australia and four in Montreal. When composing my e-mail I didn't give their location a second thought. I know they won't either when composing their replies.
Project management is the ideal workgroup application.
This might allow users to automatically update their co-workers with the status of the project by electronic mail with no human intervention whatsoever. That data might come in the form of a table, a list, a picture of a network or barchart. The manager could then review the problem and resend authorization for a particular action back to the system via e-mail again. The system could then proceed with the authorized action all without the intervention of the user. This may make for a dramatic change in what is possible with a project management system.