Today’s collaboration tools can support formal meetings to a certain extent, though there is still an immense potential for improvement when it comes to designing virtual and physical places where global design teams can collaborate in more ‘natural’ ways than existing distributed environments allow. One challenge for global product development is to support true collaboration within global design teams, where diversity and competences of the whole team can be utilized and where team members can think together rather then merely exchange information, opinions and divide work. This paper summarizes the results of several case studies and development projects performed within the Polhem Laboratory over the last four years and proposes challenges for future research. From our findings some of the most important challenges are how to support users with communication tools for more natural formal and informal communication (i.e. as a co-located team communicates), while automatically storing information and context from the distributed meetings.