The opening up of organisations has entailed the teams to work in an asynchronous context in different places. We might then call them distributed teams which are given collaborative technologies refered to as “groupwares”. As there is a wide range of products, with many different features, to be used in many working environments, the issue to be raised is one of choice for team managers. The purpose of this paper is therefore to suggest a list of criteria that would enable group managers to choose groupwares that are best adapted to their own teams. In the first part, we will present the theorical framework concerning the distributed teams, defining the main variables to be taken into account when making a choice:—groupwares, communication patterns, tasks, people and teams made up. In the second part, we researched into organisational patterns so as to test these variables with surveys and longitudinal studies. The main findings were to stress the necessity to develop group—working platforms, instead of using standard groupwares, and, to question the validity of Daft and Lengel's theory about media richness.