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.
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.
(2) At the University of Minnesota a system called SAMM (Software Aided Meeting Management) was created.
In 1992 Xerox PARC spun off Live Works Inc which developed the product LiveBoard based on the project Colab.
[4] Group Systems, which was developed by the Ventana Corporation, is generally acknowledged to be the ancestor of modern EMS.
Group Systems provided the standard functionality of modern EMS such as brainstorming and categorization, votes and discussions in the context of a chronological agenda.
The limitation to local ("same place") meetings, the substantial infrastructure requirements and the complexities of controlling the software prevented widespread adoption.
In contrast, facilitate.com adopted HTML suffering the (then) severe functional limitations of that technology for the advantage of working over the Internet.
yaM, and other pure HTML options position their products as integrated tool kits for everyday online meetings and workshops as well as the asynchronous work of virtual teams.
On the territory of post Soviet countries and Western Europe an important part in popularization and development of EMSs in recent years played locally-developed systems like SW 6000, PATENTEM,[10] GlavCom etc.
In contrast to paper-based brainstorming or brain-writing methods, contributions are directly entered by the participants and immediately visible to all, typically in anonymous format.
By overcoming social barriers with anonymity and process limitations with parallelized input, more ideas are generated and shared with less conformity than in a traditional brainstorming or brain-writing session.
Discussion tools in EMS resemble a structured chat which may be conducted on separate topics in parallel, often based on a superordinate task or question.
In many cases, a parallel electronic discussion enables the exploration of topics which would have been bypassed in traditional settings for lack of time.
Sophisticated EMS provide a range of vote methods such as numeric scale, rank order, budget or multiple selection.
Some EMS provide for voting with group identity for extra insight into the structure of consensus or dissent.
Face-to-face groups can suffer from a number of process losses including:[13][14] Consequently, the advantages of EMS supported meetings vs traditional face-to-face meetings and workshops are: The majority of drawbacks of EMS versus traditional conferences or workshops have been overcome by technological progress or by adaptation of EMS to particular target groups and their dominant use cases: The remaining drawbacks mostly result from the physical distribution of the participants when meeting online.