Sometimes message-based and artifact-based collaboration are two collaboration modes for achieving the same task. Consider the joint development of a document. We can mail each other the document or create it as a shared artifact. In these situations, it useful to integrate the two modes by allowing users to easily switch between them.
This is exactly the kind of task for which POLITeam workflow system [] was designed: developing a minister's speech. Several organizations are involved in the composing and commenting of the speech, and traditionally this collaboration task was achieved by routing the document through all the relevant organizations. With the decision of Germany to move the capital from Bonn to Berlin, there is a need to distribute this task during the transition period. POLITeam automated and distributes it by providing a workflow system that automatically routes the document to its next destination once a user was done processing it. The traditional method, however, serializes access to the document in that till a user is done with the document, no one else can access it. Based on user input, POLITeam extended this scheme by allowing the current owner of a document to temporarily share it with other users (such as the previous recipient), thereby reducing the overhead of continually sending it back and forth between them. Thus, it allows message-based and artifact-based collaboration to be interleaved in the processing of a document, thereby providing another way to integrate these two kinds of collaboration. It can be thought of a hybrid between mail and news that allows us to dynamically switch between their features: The former supports private messages in mailboxes while the latter supports public news items in bulletin boards. POLITeam provides a scheme for dynamically transforming an object from a private message to a shared artifact, and vice versa.