Community support systems (community platforms) that are providing a rich communication medium for work- or interest groups are gaining more and more attention in application areas ranging from leisure support and customer support to knowledge management. One of these application areas is the support of teaching and research activities in universities. In this article we first identify possibilities for community platforms in universities and present some applications at Technische Universität München (TUM). From the current situation at TUM we motivate that a key feature of future community platforms has to be interoperability, and concentrate on how to provide interoperability in general, and how we are doing it in the environment at TUM. In particular we focus on service independent identity management as one central aspect of interoperability.    «

Community support systems (community platforms) that are providing a rich communication medium for work- or interest groups are gaining more and more attention in application areas ranging from leisure support and customer support to knowledge management. One of these application areas is the support of teaching and research activities in universities. In this article we first identify possibilities for community platforms in universities and present some applications at Technische Universität M...    »