Flexible Workgroup Cooperation based on Shared Workspaces

摘要

The idea to use the World-Wide Web as a platform for the design and implementation of telecooperation applications is not new but there are only a few prototypes in use outside the research environment. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is one of those. The system provides cross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing Web technologies. This paper describes the underlying metaphor of a shared workspace for asynchronous cooperation, the main kernel features of BSCW and gives a description of its implementation. Finally a BSCW extension for synchronous cooperation is presented and the idea of electronic meetings and their prerequisites are discussed.