Teams whose members are in close physical proximity often rely on team rooms to serve both as meeting places and repositories of the documents and artifacts that support their projects. TeamRooms is a groupware system that fills the role of a team room for groups whose members can work both co-located and at a distance. Facilities in TeamRooms allow team members to collaborate either in real-time or asynchronously, and to customize their shared electronic space with tools to suit their needs. Unlike many groupware systems, all TeamRooms documents and artifacts are fully persistent.

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Many groupware systems contain gaps that hinder or block natural social interaction or that does not let people easily move between different styles of work. We believe that the adoption of a room metaphor can ease people’s transitions across these gaps, allowing them to work together more naturally. Using the TeamWave Workplace system as an example, we show how particular gaps are removed. First, we ease a person’s transition between single user and groupware applications by making rooms suitable for both individual and group activity. Second, people can move fluidly between asynchronous and synchronous work because room artifacts persist. People can leave messages, documents and annotations for others, or work on them together when occupying the room at the same time. Third, we ease the difficulty of initiating real time work by providing people with awareness of others who may be available for real-time interactions, and by automatically establishing connections as users enter a common room. Fourth, we discuss how a technical space can be transformed into a social place by describing how a group crafts meaning into a room. We also argue that a room metaphor’s seamless support of everyday activities will foster an environment where groups naturally share their expertise.

This dissertation analyzes the usefulness of existing "conventional" collaboration-transparency systems, which permit the shared use of legacy, single-user applications. I find that conventional collaboration-transparency systems do not use network resources efficiently, and they impose an inflexible, tightly coupled style of collaboration because they do not adequately support important groupware principles: concurrent work, relaxed WYSIWIS, group awareness, and inherently collaborative tasks. This dissertation proposes and explores solutions to those deficiencies. The primary goal of this work is to maintain the benefits of collaboration transparency while relieving some of its disadvantages. To that end, I present an alternate implementation approach that provides many features previously seen only in applications specifically designed to support cooperative work, called collaboration-aware applications. The new approach uses a replicated architecture, in which a copy of the application resides on each user's machine, and the users' input events are broadcast to each copy. I discuss solutions to certain key problems in replicated architectures, such as maintaining consistency, unanticipated sharing, supporting late-joiners, and replicating system resources (e.g., files, sockets, and random number generators). To enhance the collaborative usability of a legacy application, the new approach transparently replaces selected single-user interface objects with multi-user versions at runtime. There are four requirements of an application platform needed to implement this approach: process migration, run-time object replacement, dynamic binding, and the ability to intercept and introduce low-level user input events. As an instance of this approach, I describe its incorpor...

www.cs.usask.ca/faculty/gutwin Collaboration in current real-time groupware systems is often an awkward and clumsy process. We hypothesize that better support for workspace awareness can improve the usability of these shared computational workspaces. We conducted an experiment that compared people’s performance on two versions of a groupware interface. The interfaces used workspace miniatures to provide different levels of support for workspace awareness. The basic miniature showed information only about the local user, and the enhanced miniature showed the location and activity of others in the workspace as well. In two of three task types tested, completion times were lower with increased awareness support, and in one task type, communication was more efficient. Participants also greatly preferred the awareness-enhanced system. The study provides empirical evidence of, and underlying reasons for, the value of supporting workspace awareness in groupware.

A user interface software tool helps developers design and implement the user interface. Research on past tools has had enormous impact on today's developers---virtually all applications today were built using some form of user interface tool. In this paper, we consider cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools. From these cases we extract a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work. Using these themes, past tools can be characterized by what aspects of the user interface they addressed, their threshold and ceiling, what path of least resistance they offer, how predictable they are to use, and whether they addressed a target that became irrelevant. We believe the lessons of these past themes are particularly important now, because increasingly rapid technological changes are likely to significantly change user interfaces. We are at the dawn of an era where user interfaces are about to break out of the "desktop" box where they have been stuck for the ...

We introduce the Notification Service Transfer Protocol (NSTP), which provides a simple, common service for sharing state in synchronous multi-user applications. A Notification Server provides items of shared state to a collection of clients and notifies the clients whenever one of the items changes. The division between client and server in this system is unusual; the centralized state is uninterpreted by the server. Instead, the responsibility for semantics and processing falls on the clients, which collude to implement the application. After describing NSTP, we differentiate it from other systems in terms of the four design principles that have guided its development. Keywords Synchronous groupware, multi-user applications, group-ware infrastructure, client/server architectures, notification, protocol, design principles, performance, state sharing.

. Floor control allows users of networked multimedia applications to utilize and share resources such as remote devices, distributed data sets, telepointers, or continuous media such as video and audio without access conflicts. Floors are temporary permissions granted dynamically to collaborating users in order to mitigate race conditions and guarantee mutually exclusive resource usage. A general framework for floor control is presented. Collaborative environments are characterized and the requirements for realization of floor control will be identified. The differences to session control, as well as concurrency control and access control are elicited. Based upon a brief taxonomy of collaboration-relevant parameters, system design issues for floor control are discussed. Floor control mechanisms are discerned from service policies and principal architectures of collaborative systems are compared. The structure of control packets and an application programmer's interface are proposed and...

Real-time educational groupware systems allow physically separated learners to work together in a shared virtual workspace at the same time. These systems do not yet approach the interaction richness of a face-to-face learning situation. In particular, one element poorly supported is workspace awareness: the up-to-the-minute knowledge a student requires about other students ’ interactions with the shared workspace. This awareness is essential if students are to learn and work together effectively. We present a framework of several types of awareness required by students in a collaborative learning situation, including their social, task, concept and workspace awareness. We then concentrate on workspace awareness, and describe how particular awareness requirements of students in group learning situations depend on the closeness of their tasks, and whether they are sharing the same view or have separate views into the workspace. From these requirements, we have prototyped several awareness widgets for educational groupware. These widgets help learners maintain awareness of other learners ’ locations when their views are separated, of other learners ’ activities in shared and separate view situations, and of other learners ’ past activities.

Good real time groupware products are hard to develop, in part because evaluating their support for the basic activities of teamwork is difficult and costly. To address this problem, we are developing discount evaluation methods that look for groupware-specific usability problems. In a previous paper, we detailed a new set of usability heuristics that evaluators can use to inspect shared workspace groupware to see how they support for teamwork. We wanted to determine whether the new heuristics could be integrated into a low-cost methodology that parallels Nielsen’s traditional heuristic evaluation (HE). To this end, we examined 27 evaluations of two shared workspace groupware systems and analysed the inspectors ’ relative performance and variability. Similar to Nielsen’s findings for traditional HE, individual inspectors discovered about a fifth of the total known teamwork problems, and that there was only modest overlap in the problems they found. Groups of three to five inspectors would report about 40– 60 % of the total known teamwork problems. These results suggest that heuristic evaluation using our groupware heuristics can be an effective and efficient method for identifying teamwork problems in shared workspace groupware systems.