The TAP project MATES has developed a suite of multimedia conferencing tools to support more effective collaboration in multi-site development projects, and is especially suited to the needs of small companies.

Industry today is confronted with an increase in the complexity and flexibility of its products, and also by the need to reduce time-to-market. Increasingly, the expertise and resources needed can not be found in any one location or company. New models of product development, such as co-design, interaction with product marketing and co-production, require collaboration across sites and even across companies. Distributed working methods require specific attention to the globalisation of tasks such as development, engineering, project management and data management. MATES is offering multimedia tools to support collaborative work that can be used to construct, for example, distributed engineering or interactive remote maintenance environments. Such tools will remove the geographical constraints in firmsą working arrangements, allowing them to respond more quickly and effectively to market demands. The MATES tools have been developed specifically with the needs of SMEs in mind.

The system provides conferencing and remote presentation tools for use across the Internet. Three different types of tools are used. Communication services handle data exchanges between specified addressees by means such as e-mail, audio conferencing, video conferencing and "white boarding". Co-operation services allow users to make intermediate results available, and to support consensus building through discussion forums using platforms such as Lotus Domino Notes, AltaVista and Netscape Collabra. Co-ordination services allow team members to work together on the same data in a controlled and organised way. An important aspect is support for engineering processes and procedures, by adding distributed access to existing applications and their data. The system is able to work within a wide area network, including "multi-casting" across the Internet.

The project has developed a set of applications, which are already in pilot usage.

A Distributed Engineering Environment could use the MATES system to use any of the following tools:

Communication services: