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When people have meetings or discussions, frequently they use conversational props : physical models, drawings, or other concrete representations of information used to enhance the exchange of information. If the participants are geographically separated, it is difficult to make effective use of props since each physical prop can only exist in one place. Computer applications that allow two or more users to simultaneously view and manipulate the same data can be used to augment human-to-human telecommunication. We have built the Rendezvous system is similar to many UIMSs or user interface toolkits in that it is intended to simplify the construction of graphical direct-manipulation interfaces. It goes beyond these systems by adding functionality to support the construction of multiuser applications. Based on experience with several large applications built with the Rendezvous system, we believe that it is useful for building conversational props and other computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) applications. We present a list of required features of conversational props, some example applications built with the Rendezvous system, and a description of the Rendezvous system.

Collaboration is an integral part of software development, occurring through tools inside and outside the IDE. This paper presents an overview of the Jazz project, which seeks to integrate collaborative capabilities into the Eclipse IDE, enabling small teams of software developers to work together more productively.

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Rendezvousis an architecture for creating synchronous multi-user applications.It consists of two parts: a run-time architecture for managing the multi-user session and a start-up architecture for managing the network connectivity.The run-time architecture is based on a User Interface Management System called MEL, which is a language extension to Common Lisp providing support for graphics operations, object-oriented programming, and constraints. Constraints are used to manage three dimensions of sharing: sharing of underlying information, sharing of views, and sharing of access. The start-up architecture decouples invoking and joining an application so that not all users need be known when the application is started. At present, the run-time architecture is completed and running test applications. As a first test of the complete Rendezvous architecture, we will implement a multi-user card game by the end of the summer.