One of the tasks of Task Group 3 of the ECO-Serve Network 'Communication and Dissemination' is the implementation of a project centre (e-based project office) for all involved partners.

In order to identify what the EcoServe membership expects from a Project Centre and how they want to use it, the Task Group prepared a first enquiry. This questionnaire was distributed at the ECO-Serve workshop of March 18, 2003 and put on the website as well. Later on, a revised questionnaire was sent out to all ECO-Serve members who were requested to fill it in and return it.

The questionnaire contained a list of features that could be included in a project office and the members were asked to specify their previous experience with such tools (from 0 (no experience) to 3 (positive experience)) and their option about the relevance for the ECO-Serve Network (from 0 (no relevance) to 3 (necessary)). Also additional comments were welcome. Features that were listed:

-         Password projected access levels for internal use within the ECO-Serve network

-         Store and share of administrative documents

-         Store and share of project working documents

-         Database with RTD reports and documents on related projects

-         Mailing lists of the different task groups/clusters

-         Mail boxes for the different task groups/clusters

-         Automatic notification by email of new contributions to project centre

-         Manual notification by email of new contributions

-         Forum for discussion

-         Chat for online communication

-         Task lists with timetables of each task group

-         Calendar with agenda’s of meetings, workshops,…

-         Others

Of the 46 members who received a questionnaire 31 replied. This means one third of the members did not return the questionnaire. They will be contacted to ask why they didn’t respond.

A general conclusion of the enquiry was that the ECO-Serve members are interested in most of the features of a project office, but have little experience with them.

Following list is the top 5 of features with the highest priority:

-         Calendar

-         Task Lists

-         Administrative documents

-         Database

-         Mailing lists

Of all the features that were listed only the chat was found of little importance followed by the mail boxes and the forum. All the other tools were considered useful or even necessary for the communication and dissemination of information in the ECO-Serve network.

Taken into account this result from the questionnaire, the task group started using and evaluating group software. At first, the free service of MayeticVillage was used to create a project office at http://www.mayeticvillage.com/eco-serve. It contains a calendar, a task list, a forum, a library, a members list and a link to the website.

As an alternative a project office was created at the Project Office VTT uses internally for their projects http://www.vtt.fi/project/. This project office has all features as the one of MayeticVillage but offers more possibilities for ECO-Serve. Therefore, the task group agreed to continue using the VVT project office instead of MayeticVillage. After an evaluation period of the task group, all members will get access to this project office.

Later on towards the end of the project, a second questionnaire will be prepared to verify if the work of task group 3 has changed the view of the ECO-Serve members on the features of a project office.