Categorically speaking: reflecting AEC/FM participants' requirements in Groupware

Groupware allows participants in an AEC/FM project to timely share relevant electronic project information at near real-time speed. One challenge of existing groupware tools is the varying information categorization needs of different AEC/FM project participants within the same groupware environment. This paper introduces initial results of a survey of several AEC/FM companies' project information categorizations. These initial results reveal differences in the ways AEC/FM project participants organize project information within each company. These differences will result in the need for a comprehensive information categorization solution when companies move their organized company specific project information to a project-wide repository in groupware. In the future, as a result of this research, a comprehensive project categorization scheme will be introduced which would allow participant-specific views of the AEC/FM project information to be rendered.