A layered architecture for advanced collaborative environments has been developed to map the definition of a collaboration task from the requirements needed to accomplish the task, to the collaboration services that can be used to satisfy those needs, and to the technologies on which the services can be delivered. The architecture takes into account the users? goals and needs in configuring the services required for a collaboration task. By understanding and designing for users? needs and requirements, we can ensure a high Quality of Experience (QoE). The architecture was used to create a prototype system that is currently being tested through user studies.