The use of groupware, or collaborative work-supporting technologies, has become wide-spread, but many existing groupware systems are too difficult to integrate with domain-specific software applications, only work for specific user interface hardware, or provide inappropriate, thick-client architectural solutions. We describe a set of server-side software components we have developed providing a variety of thin-client groupware solutions (chat, email, annotation, to-do lists, notification etc). These components provide HTML and WML-based thinclient user interfaces and can be readily “plugged into” the server-side architectures of domain-specific applications. We focus on the key issues of designing and realising the user interfaces for such groupware solutions and report on our experiences to date.
John C. Grundy, Xing Wang, John G. Hosking