Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web (W3) offers a great deal of potential for the developers of collaborative technologies, both as an enabling infrastructure and a platform for integration with existing end-user environments. This paper describes a system which attempts to exploit that potential by extending the W3 to provide a set of basic facilities for collaborative information sharing. The BSCW Shared Workspace system was conceived as an alternative to tools which currently support collaborative working for widely dispersed working groups such as electronic mail and ftp. We report on the design and implementation of our system, the problems we encountered, and the benefits accruing from our choice of the W3 as an enabling platform. Our experiences suggest how recent developments in the W3 point the way to more suitable and powerful mechanisms to support the development of collaborative systems.
Bentley et al. (Mon,) studied this question.