How the Web is used to support collaborative writing

Abstract

We present 19 systems that have been developed over the past decade to support collaborative writing over the Web. The aim of this article is to present the state of the art on the use of the Web for collaborative writing and thus (1) help designers improve current systems or define future systems, and (2) help users choose the most appropriate system to support their needs. Among available systems, groups can select from tools to write a document (on-or off-line), collect comments about a document, or maintain a Web site. The lack of experimental data concerning Web-based applications forces designers to use other sources of information to guide their design choices, such as a list of functions that an ideal collaborative writing tool should offer. This list has revealed several potential points for improvement.

Evaluating and implementing a collaborative office document system

“…Since an exhaustive review of such systems is beyond the scope of this paper, we refer the reader to review articles (e.g. Newman and Newman, 1992;Noël and Robert, 2003). The requirements of collaborative teams can be much more difficult than those for standalone software.…”

Exploring and Supporting Today's Collaborative Writing

“…55 Participants reported that their choice of editing directly versus commenting indirectly was related to the social status of the collaborator. For example, participants reported that they would not want to change their advisors' (or managers') words.…”

A Mashup Tool for Collaborative Engineering of Service-Oriented Enterprise Documents

“…A study of tools for collaborative writing, including early Wiki software, is presented in [5]. The study shows, that the idea of splitting a document into fragments for different authors and propagating updates of these fragments to other authors is not new.…”

“…Various technologies and tools support either collaborative creation and evolution of documents (e.g. CSCW technologies, wikis or other Webbased collaborative writing applications [5]) or coordination of structured processes (e.g. BPM technologies like WfMS).…”