Many cyberinfrastructures that are being built in the United States and in Europe have the goal of enabling large-scale distributed science and engineering collaborations. However, there is the need for groupware tools that will enable distributed and heterogeneous teams of people to effectively collaborate within these global scenarios. To this purpose, we have worked with various international scientific institutions (within European projects GRIDCC and EuroTEv) to develop groupware solutions that enable shared access to and control of distributed instrumentation.