Tools for transparent synchronous collaborative environments

Synchronous collaborative environments can provide an identical visual and operable working area among geographically separated participants. There are two basic approaches for providing a shared workspace. They are collaborative-aware approach and collaborative-unaware approach. Since the second approach allows single-user applications to be reused, most users choose to use it. Our work is based on the collaborative-unaware environment. This paper describes the design and implementation of some transparent synchronous collaborative tools. They are: (1) the latecomer support for Java applications, Java applets and JMF players (2) the client synchronization to minimize data transmission latency and (3) the lightweight multi-session support to let different collaboration groups work at the same time. These tools optimize existing transparent synchronous collaboration systems and make them more realistic, more complete and more generic. Keywords Synchronous collaborative environments

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: MTA
• Authors: Abdulmotaleb El-Saddik, Dongsheng Yang, Nicolas D. Georganas
• Keywords: MTA 2007, Synchronous Collaborative, Synchronous Collaborative Environments, Transparent Synchronous Collaborative