and workshops as well as the asynchronous work of virtual teams. A special role is played amongst EMS by the product nextModerator which provides interactive tools to very large groups assembled in one location for a special event. On the territory of post Soviet countries and Western Europe an important part in popularization and development of EMSs in recent years played locally-developed systems like SW 6000, PATENTEM, GlavCom etc. Standard functionality An electronic meeting system is a suite of configurable collaborative software tools that can be used to create predictable, repeatable patterns of collaboration among people working toward a goal. With an electronic meeting system, each user typically has his or her own computer, and each user can contribute to the same shared object (session) at the same time. Thus, nobody needs to wait for a turn to speak and people don't forget what they want to say while they are waiting for the floor. When a group or a group's host deem it appropriate, people can contribute anonymously to most electronic meeting systems tools: this allows the group to focus on the content of ideas, rather than their sources. Most EMS provide the standard functionalities described below but differ markedly in the handling and functional depth of these tools. Further, they differ by the set of additional tools they provide and by the way they are administered or integrated into a corporate IT environment. They also differ in the degree of interoperability with web conferencing systems for screen sharing and voice conferencing. Brainstorming and categorization In an electronic brainstorming, the group creates a shared list of ideas. In contrast to paper-based brainstorming or brain-writing methods, contributions are directly entered by the participants and immediately visible to all, typically in anonymous format. By overcoming social barriers with anonymity and process limitations with parallelized input, more ideas are generated and shared with less conformity than in a traditional brainstorming or brain-writing session. The benefits of electronic brainstorming increase with group size. In many cases, subsequent to a brainstorming session or the collection of contributions, ideas require categorization. For this, in modern EMS, participants drag contributions from the shared list to category folders or buckets. Discussion Discussion tools in EMS resemble a structured chat which may be conducted on separate topics in parallel, often based on a superordinate task or question. Parallelization occurs at multiple levels: (1) At the level of multiple