Shared workspaces for group collaboration: an experiment using Internet and UNIX interprocess communications

Abstract

The system described is intended to link institutions (such as universities or industrial research organizations) that have most of their computers connected to local area networks (LANs). The main objective of the research is to bring users of remote systems together to collaborate in reviewing and editing documents containing text, graphs and image objects. The term workspace is used to denote a collection of such objects belonging to some application, and the software tools needed to access these objects. The major components of the system and the user interface are presented. A prototype implemented in C under 4.3BSD UNIX is discussed. The system is then related to and contrasted with other work on group collaboration. The suitability and shortcomings of UNIX as an operating system for building group collaboration software tools are assessed.