Session management for collaborative applications

Session management systems for collaborative applications have required a great deal of reimplementation work by developers because they have been typically created on a case-by-case basis. Further, artifacts of this development process have limited the flexibility of session management systems and their ability to cooperate across applications, resulting in the fairly formalized, heavy-weight session management found in most collaborative systems today. We present a model for a light-weight form of session management, the theoretical foundation for this model (based on the sharing of information about user and system activity), and details of a collaboration support environment which implements our session management model.