BM_VE Architecture Reference Model for Concurrent Engineering Antonio José Caulliraux Pithon Federal Center of Technological Education Goran D. Putnik University of Minho, Portugal INTRODUCTION To support the requirements for the new organizational forms of enterprises, the cooperative work and work groups approach has appeared. Cooperative work may be defined as one where a group of people, physically separated or not, articulate the accomplishment of a common task in a synchronous or asynchronous form. In order to cooperate, a previous agreement should be considered. All should be committed to work to reach use of information technology to support the educa- tion organization and process (Pithon & Putnik, 2005). This experiment was carried out by computer science students in their last year and undertaken in the period of October 27-30, 2003. The experience simultaneously involved three work groups, specially the agile and virtual groups of the BM_VEARM model, with the application of diverse software. The only asynchronous communication tool used among the members of the groups was e-mail.