at Xerox PARC focused on small cooperating groups of 2 - 6 individuals, work at the University of Arizona focused on groups of 16 - 24. The late 1980s saw the beginnings of a commercial market for EMS. In 1989, the University of Arizona founded Ventana Corporation to transfer the Plexsys technology from the laboratory to the workplace. In 1992 Xerox PARC spun off Live Works Inc which developed the product LiveBoard based on the project Colab. The 1990s: Early LAN-based systems Group Systems, which was developed by the Ventana Corporation, is generally acknowledged to be the ancestor of modern EMS. Group Systems provided the standard functionality of modern EMS such as brainstorming and categorization, votes and discussions in the context of a chronological agenda. Contributions could be entered in parallel and anonymously. The results of one step of the meeting process e.g., a brainstorming, could be copied to a follow-up tool e.g., a vote. The product was based on Clients running on Microsoft Windows machines which accessed a server running a Paradox database via a mapped drive on the local network (LAN). The limitation to local ("same place") meetings, the substantial infrastructure requirements and the complexities of controlling the software prevented widespread adoption. Consequently, Group Systems was developed as a tool for the expert facilitator of computer-aided meetings. These meetings were often conducted in custom computer-equipped conference rooms or by specialised consultancies with dedicated kit. In the late 1990s and early 2000s further EMS such as the Dutch Inteam or the American Meetingworks sprang up. As LAN-based client-server systems they shared the limitations of such systems. In contrast, facilitate.com adopted HTML suffering the (then) severe functional limitations of that technology for the advantage of working over the Internet. Web applications Since 2005 EMS development has focused on browser-based systems and easy to use GUIs. Prototypical for this generation of EMS are the product Thinktank which is based on Group Systems, the later MeetingSphere the anonymous electronic brainstorming focused Monsoon and the pure HTML yet another Meeting All of these products deliver the functionality of an EMS over the Internet, however, they differ as to their focus and functional depth: MeetingSphere and Spilter are very complete, functional, user-friendly and professional. ThinkTank provides and extends rich functionality with an eye to professionally facilitated workshops. yaM, and other pure HTML options position their products as integrated tool kits for everyday online meetings