While groupware systems are increasingly adopted by people and organizations in their daily collaboration work, the absence of a workspace concept in such systems makes them behave differently from the actual collaboration environment in the physical world. The emergence of workspace systems has narrowed this gap and improved the adaptability of people to migrate from the traditional physical work environment to the virtual collaboration environment. This thesis outlines the design of a generic workspace collaboration system model, identifying the main components and architecture of such system. It details the properties of a workspace system and the mechanism of collaboration activities within the system. It further introduces a customization model for a workspace collaboration system which increases the ability of the system to support a vast range of collaborative scenarios. The final result is applied to an experimental system, eGroupWare, as a case study for the thesis.