Electronic group support systems (GSS) are distributed computer technologies, developed to support cooperative work in organisations, predominantly in a business environment. Electronic meeting systems (EMS), for example, are GSS specifically developed to support meetings. The considerable experience gathered from the use of GSS in business is briefly summarised and discussed, with the aim of determining the potential use of this technology in university education. The current transfer of the GSS technology into universities is critically examined, in particular in the perspective of the rapidly emerging global platform of distributed multimedia technology. The discussion is exemplified with the experience of GroupSystems, a University of Arizona EMS experimentally used in education at Griffith University.
