Although much effort has been invested to build applications that support group work, collaborative applications have not found easy success. The cost of adopting and maintaining collaborative applications has prevented their widespread use, especially among small distributed groups. Application developers have had difficulties recognizing the extra effort required by groups to use collaborative applications and how to either reduce this effort or provide other benefits to compensate for the extra work. These problems have limited the success of collaborative applications, which have not attained the same level of productivity improvements that single user applications have achieved. In this thesis we present a framework that describes the types of computer support that can facilitate the work of distributed engineering design groups. Our framework addresses support for web-based groups in particular because we believe the web can be a powerful medium for collaboration if accommodated properly. We show how the concepts in this framework can be implemented by prototyping a web-based engineering decision support system. Our framework is a synthesis of ideas motivated by an examination of literature in various fields that share a common interest in collaborative work. It can influence application development by helping developers become aware of the types of support should be considered to aid web-based collaborative design
