This is a standard feature allowing users to simultaneously view and alter files in real time. Audio and video conferencing, offered by Microsoft and Netscape, are relatively new features on the groupware scene. With a nice sound card and a video camera, users can conference without flying across the globe. Of course, they will save even the time it takes to walk to the next desk, too. Chat, however, is the more common conferencing technology.
Users just connect directly to other e-mail addresses and type messages in realtime.
To understand which groupware to choose, organizations must first understand the problems they want to solve. The Florida Governor's Office needed their groupware to be flexible. It choose Lotus Notes. Notes can handle documents that have thousands of pages of text. In those documents you can have embedded graphics, spreadsheets and word-processing documents.