We report on our experiences of introducing an instant messaging and group chat application into geographically distributed workgroups. We describe a number of issues we encountered, including privacy concerns, individual versus group training, and focusing on teams or individuals. The perception of the tool's utility was a complex issue, depending both on users' views of the importance of informal communication, and their perceptions of the nature of cross-site communication issues. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of critical mass, which is related to the features each user actually uses. More generally, we encountered a dilemma that imposes serious challenges for user-centered design of groupware systems

The world of computing is becoming a world in which people work, learn, and play together, rather than as single users. This change in people's perspective and expectations will be a major driver of the future of computing. In this paper the convergence of a virtual video club system and a virtual classroom is presented. A single framework for developing multiparty virtual environment applications is explored.

The Personal Presence System (PPS) is an experimental prototype platform to support advanced Broadband applications including multimedia conferencing and distance learning. The PPS supports user presentation control of advanced network elements (multimedia bridges). The multimedia bridges are shared network resources which are designed for deployment in proximity to other switching and transcoding resources. The multimedia bridge provides for a single point of contact for each user so that only one combined video stream is received, thereby minimizing access bandwidth. This architecture solves the N squared transmission problem of multipoint video conferencing and allows customer premises terminal equipment to be much simpler and less expensive than high end desktop workstations. A conventional television with a set-top box may also be used as the terminal equipment for a multiparty multimedia teleconference, enabling universal video teleconferencing.