Evaluating and implementing a collaborative office document system

Abstract

Collaborative work with office suite documents such as word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files usually demands special tools and methods. For this application, we have developed TellTable, a relatively simple web-based framework built largely from available software and infrastructure. TellTable allows the use of existing office-suite software in a collaborative manner that is controlled but is familiar to users of common single user software. From the literature and our research, we identify twelve challenges to collaborative editing software that we use in an evaluation checklist: time and space, awareness, communication, private and shared work spaces, intellectual property, simultaneity and locking, protection, workflow, security, file format, platform independence, and user benefit. We then use this checklist to characterize TellTable in comparison to some other collaborative office tools. q

Using the Control Balance Theory to Explain Social Media Deviance

“…Evaluation awareness refers to the users' knowledge that their actions are being logged as well as reviewed [74]. In general, perceptions of evaluation awareness tend to make people engage less in unacceptable behaviors [1]. Researchers have argued that as people become more aware that their actions are being evaluated, they behave in a more acceptable fashion, while also reducing their unacceptable behavior as accountability perceptions are heightened [74,78,79].…”

On the Challenges of Collaborative Data Processing

“…Shareable spreadsheets are familiar to users, but were designed for single users. Based on our survey and on earlier work (Adler et al, 2006;Aouiche et al, 2008), here are some features that we recommend:…”

“…This offers the interesting advantage that the user is not forced to learn a new tool in order to do their work. TellTable (Adler et al, 2006) is a web-based framework that can turn single user software (including spreadsheets) into collaborative software. TellTable was originally built to provide an audit trail for spreadsheets .…”

“…Version control in situations where changes can be reverted or done in parallel remains challenging (Adler et al 2006). Keeping track of changes can be particularly difficult with databases as compared with text.…”

“…Many of these tools are aimed at supporting either group meetings (brainstorming tools, shared whiteboards, videoconferencing tools) or collaborative writing (wikis). These tools have been studied extensively (Pedersen et al, 1993;Okada et al, 1994;Adler et al, 2006). However, although more and more data is being collected, indexed and made available to all, collaborative data processing has received little attention until recently (Viégas et al, 2007(Viégas et al, , 2008.…”