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In asynchronous communication inside the project team, but also in the students-teachers communication, an important role was played by Content Management System FER Web CMS, which was completely dveloped at FER. FER Web's main features used in the DSD course included:

• hosting of the DSD course public web site
• hosting of the DSD course internal collaboration space

The requirement for both purposes included intensive development of English language templates and course structure. FER Web's internal architecture enabled unlimited number of languages to be used for templates but until that moment, only Croatian templates had been created).

Requirements for internal collaboration space have been much more demanding as it required usage of the following modules:

• information exchange and news management
• HTML editors with integrated WYSIWYG capability
• document repositories used for exchange of project descriptions, document templates, document examples, etc.
• link repositories for managing lists of resources outside the CMS
• discussion forums, for project-related discussions and requirements tracking
• chat, for chat sessions among team members

User permissions policy integrated into FER Web CMS enabled only authorized project members to use their project space.

Some of the modules of FER Web CMS, used for content management, communication and collaboration are presented below

WYSIWYG editor for editing course content News editor Frequently asked questions

Document repository Discussion forum Chat Link repository

Although, generally speaking, FERWeb CMS has proven to be the system that can foster distributed work and collaboration and did its job as teams' memory and knowledge center well, several weaknesses were reported. In the beginning, most bug fixes had to deal with newly introduced English language templates. The fact that the rest of the CMS content was in Croatian, represented problem for Swedish students, in case when they clicked on some link that would, for instance, lead them to FER's homepage, which is in Croatian. There were also problems with chat, which was in early development stage at that moment and did not enable viewing chat history. This was considered a problem for students who have missed some parts of chat sessions and wanted to know what had been said while they were gone. Therefore, one of the student projects had a goal of creating a chat system that would have all necessary features for fostering remote collaboration.

FERWeb CMS enabled team members to have a so-called 360°-view of the project status and project surrounding environment and fostered the students’ sense of belonging to their project team.