The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is developing tools that provide support for crossplatform information sharing for groups of users over the World-Wide Web. The basis for these tools is the BSCW shared workspace system-a centralised shared information system integrated with an unmodified Web server and accessible from standard Web browsers. In this paper we discuss the experiences with the public release of version 1 of the system and the subsequent re-design for the current version (version 2), following feedback from the users. We describe particular problems, and demonstrate our solutions, arising from the choice of the Web as a platform for collaboration tools, and extend this to suggest that some of our experiences may be more generally applicable to the design of effective collaboration-support systems.