Abstract: In the present global economy, strongly influenced by IT and information systems evolution, the modern organizations try to face the new economy challenges. It is certain, that the enterprise’s performance will depend on the capacity to sustain collaborative work.
It is obvious, that all collaborative environments (workgroups, communities of practice, collaborative enterprises) are based on knowledge and between collaboration and knowledge management there is a strong interdependence. The evolution of information systems in these collaborative environments led to the sudden necessity to adopt, for maintaining the virtual activities and processes, the latest technologies/systems, which are capable to support integrated collaboration in business services. In these environments, portal-based IT platforms will integrate multi-agent collaborative systems, collaborative tools, different enterprise applications and other useful information systems.
All considerations have a strong research background, our portal-based proposal for sustaining collaboration and knowledge management in organizations being subject of some Romanian research projects that are fitting in the European research demarches.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Currently, professor Mihaela I. Muntean is the chair of the Business Information Systems and Statistics Department at the West University of Timisoara and an IT independent consultant. With a background in Computer Science and a Ph.D. obtained both in Technical Science and in Economic Science (Economic Informatics), professor Mihaela I. Muntean focused her research activity on topics like information technology, knowledge management, business intelligence, business information system. Over 70 papers in indexed reviews and conference proceedings and the involvement with success in 7 multi-annual national research grants/projects are sustaining her contributions in the research fields mentioned above.