Designing the Communications Infrastructure of Groupware Systems

Abstract

Abstract. In the development of groupware systems a well designed communications infrastructure is required, due to the high complexity of the communication scenario. Also, the design and implementation of coordination and collaboration mechanisms depends on the communications infrastructure. Actually there are no well known guidelines to design this infrastructure. Therefore, this paper proposes an architectural pattern that helps carry out the design of this communications infrastructure. The proposed pattern supports all the groupware systems communication scenarios, taking in account their particularities. This pattern has been used in the design of several groupware applications and a groupware framework with very good results.

CLPL: Providing software infrastructure for the systematic and effective construction of complex collaborative learning systems

“…The latter (Dillenbourg, 1999b) means cooperation at different times and the shared resource will be stored in a persistent support. The different areas overlap each other (see Figure 1) and any collaborative system must support all of them (Ochoa et al, 2002):…”

“…or synchronously (participants communicate at the same time such as chat, video conference, etc.). The communication support is based on four elements involved: a message as the information carrier between a sender process and a recipient process (which receives and possibly process the message) through a channel (Ochoa et al, 2002). Moreover, in this context, it is necessary to implement different ways of message addressing such as point-to-point, multicast and broadcast.…”

“…The coordination support module offers the basic tools to facilitate group organization in planning and accomplishing the members' objectives as well as group monitoring by modeling the awareness of its participants. The communication support module involves four basic elements, the sender, message, channel and receiver (Ochoa, 2002), and can be implemented in several ways depending on the means of message transmission (point-to-point, multicast and broadcast). Moreover, each message can be delivered asynchronously (as in the case of an email, where the message is made persistent by default) or synchronously (as in a chat, where conversation is made persistent so that it can later be processed).…”

Reusing Groupware Applications

“…By reusing this idea, GPC middleware was created to help overcome the limitations of portability of such groupware solutions. Because most of white-box server platforms use event-based client-server architectures [9], GPC acts as an intermediary homogenizing the interaction between groupware applications and white-box server platforms. This homogenization gives portability to the applications.…”

Building a Software Service for Mobile Devices to Enhance Awareness in Web Collaboration

“…Web collaboration is to assist in the three main areas of any collaboration, namely coordination, cooperation, communication, with communication being the base for reaching coordination and cooperation [5], [6]. Moreover, awareness is essential for any of these three areas due to its positive impact in on-line collaborative work in terms of group motivation, interaction, or problem-solving abilities [6], [7].…”