This paper describes the development of the generic collaboration support architecture CAKE incorporating case-based reasoning (CBR). CAKE provides unified access to knowledge available within an organization, and CBR technology is used throughout the system to distribute this knowledge to agents as required. Adaptive workflows and collaboration patterns selected by a CBR process are introduced for explicitly describing collaboration among agents. In order to guide the technical design of the architecture, a systematic analysis of the requirements for collaboration support has been performed in various application domains.