Electronic meeting system

An electronic meeting system (EMS) is a type of computer software that facilitates creative problem solving and decision-making of groups within or across organizations. The term was coined by Alan R. Dennis et al. in 1988. The term is synonymous with Group Support Systems (GSS) and essentially synonymous with Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). Electronic meeting systems form a class of applications for computer supported cooperative work.

Mainly through (optional) anonymization and parallelization of input, electronic meeting systems overcome many deleterious and inhibitive features of group work.

Similar to a web conference, a host invites the participants to an electronic meeting via email. After logging into the session, meeting attendees participate primarily through their keyboards, typing responses to questions and prompts from the meeting host.

Electronic meeting systems need to be distinguished on the one hand from classic groupware, on the other from web conferencing systems. In reality, there is some overlap between minor features of products of the named categories.

The main difference from groupware is the intensity of collaboration. According to Lubich's classification, groupware supports collaboration within groups where the individual contributions remain identifiable. In contrast, EMS enable the group to cooperatively produce a result for which the group is responsible as a whole. In a business process, groupware and electronic meeting systems complement each other: Groupware supports teams when researching and creating documents in the run up to an EMS session or when implementing the results of such a session.

Web conferencing systems and electronic meeting systems complement each other in the online meeting or workshop: EMS extends the web conferencing system by providing interactive tools for producing and documenting group results. On the other hand, web conferencing systems complement EMS with the screensharing and voice conferencing functionality required in synchronous online meetings and not present in EMS.

Nunamaker et al. cite the CASE project PSL/PSA of the mid sixties as the beginnings of EMS technology. The first systems recognizable as EMS from today's perspective developed in the early 1980s as university and research projects. (1) At the University of Arizona, a prototype called Plexsys was developed building on the PSL/PSA project. (2) At the University of Minnesota a system called SAMM (Software Aided Meeting Management) was created. (3) At Xerox PARC, Colab was developed. (4) Researchers at the University of Michigan developed MAC-based EMS-tools.

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