Groupware and the World Wide Web

Transcription

1 Groupware and the World Wide Web Edited by Richard Bentley, Uwe Busbach, David Kerr & Klaas Sikkel German National Research Center for Information Technology, Institutefor Applied Information Technology (GMD-FIT), Sankt-Augustin, Germany Reprinted from Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Joumal of Collaborative Computing Volume 6, Nos. 2-3,1997 SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

2 A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Printed on acid-free paper AlI Rights Reserved 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1997 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

3 Contents RICHARD BENTLEY, UWE BUSBACH, DAVID KERR & KLAAS SIKKEL / Preface RICHARD BENTLEY, THILO HORSTMANN & JONATHAN TREVOR / The World Wide Web as Enabling Technology for CSCW: The Case of BSCW 1 ALAN DIX / Challenges and Perspectives for Cooperative Work on the Web: An Analytical Approach 25 MANUEL ROMERO SALCEDO & DOMINIQUE DECOUCHANT / Structured Cooperative Authoring for the World Wide Web 47 ANTONIETTA GRASSO, JEAN-LUC MEUNIER, DANIELE PAGANI & REMO PARESCHI / Distributed Coordination and Workflow on the World Wide Web 65 MARK GINSBURG & KATHERINE DULmA / Enterprise-Level Groupware Choices: Evaluating Lotus Notes and Intranet-Based Solutions 91 RODGER LEA, YASUAKI HONDA & KOUICHI MATSUDA / Virtual Society: Collaboration in 3D Spaces on the Internet 117 v

4 Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing 6: v-vi, V Preface The World Wide Web hardly needs an introduction. Originally designed as an infrastructure to improve the accessibility of scientific data, the Web existed for several years before drawing general attention. The subsequent rapid growth began with the emergence of Web browser programs which were easy to use and to obtain. Although much of the functionality already existed - viz., document retrieval from remote computers over the Internet - the browser interface, indexing and search facilities offered by the Web have changed the usage and the nature of the Internet. The scope and accessibility of available information make the Web an entirely novel tool. The rise of the World Wide Web poses a number of questions to the CSCW community. In what ways does the Web, as it exists now, facilitate cooperation over the Internet or a corporate intranet? What are the factors that made the Web such a success? How can Web technology contribute to the construction of CSCW applications? Which adaptations and extensions to the Web would be needed in order to make it a platform better suited fof the needs of cooperative work, or the creation and deployment of CSCW systems? The state of the art is extremely volatile and developments in this area continue at rapid pace. Today's prototypes and systems are likely to be obsolete tomorrow. The designers of tomorrow's systems can learn from the design decisions, rationales and problems involved in today's systems, and for that reason alone a special issue on CSCW and the Web is worthy of publication. But, even though there is some emphasis on the technological aspects, this issue is aimed at a wider audience. The six articles here discuss the possibilities, problems and perspectives for CSCW on the World Wide Web from very different points of view. As a collection, this special issue is a good introduction to the relevant issues and, as such, worth more than the sum of its parts. The event that triggered the genesis of this special issue was a workshop on 'CSCW and the Web' held at GMD in Sankt Augustin, Germany, in February 1996.* At this gathering, organised by the ERCIM World Wide Web Working Group (W4G) and GMD, a number of researchers presented Web-related CSCW systems ranging from simple tools that have been successfully employed to grand visions yet to be realised. We invited authors of some of the papers presented at the workshop to submit their work to this special issue and, in order to broaden the scope, we invited other research groups working in this area but not represented at * CSCW and the Web: Proceedings of the 5th ERCIM/W4G Workshop, GMD Working Paper 984, available from GMD-FJT, Sankt Augustin, D Germany or online at:

5 vi PREFACE the workshop to submit a paper. All the papers submitted have been subjected to the standard CSCW Journal review and revision process. The first article of this special issue by Bentley et al. introduces the World Wide Web and discusses its potential as an 'enabling technology for CSCW'. This potential is illustrated with a description of the BSCW shared workspace system to reveal possibilities and problems posed by the Web for CSCW system developers. Even without such extension, however, the World Wide Web is already a collaborative environment in a weak sense. In the second paper, Dix investigates the reasons for the tremendous success of the Web and analyses its strengths and weaknesses as a platform for cooperation. The following two articles present systems that exploit the Web as an infrastructure for CSCW applications. The Alliance system, presented by Romero and Decouchant, is some of the most advanced work that has been carried out in the area of collaborative authoring, and the authors discuss in detail the mechanisms required to bring the Alliance system to the Web. Grasso et al. then present their work with the WebFlow system which uses the Web as an interface and architecture for supporting distributed workflows - an area gaining much attention following the penetration of the Web into organisations in the guise of the corporate intranet. The topic of the intranet is the focus of the paper by Ginsburg and Duliba, which examines collaboration technologies from the perspective of (large) organisations. Their perspective is the choice faced by IT management when looking to deploy groupware tools, and in this case the choice between Lotus Notes and Web-based intranet solutions. This choice is of crucial importance to a firm yet is an issue not widely discussed in the CSCW community. While the previous papers focus on the Web as a platform for CSCW in its current form, the final paper of this special issue adopts a more visionary stance. In describing their CommunityPlace system, Lea et al. examine the broadening of the Web to encompass 3D multi-user worlds which provide rich environments for cooperative work for widely-dispersed users. This well written and thought provoking article shows how current work in the area of Virtual Reality, of great interest to CSCW researchers, can be brought to the Internet and thus to a vastly greater user group. In finalising the content of this special issue a well-deserved word of thanks must go to the 26 anonymous referees; their detailed and constructive critiques have led to significant improvements in the quality of the papers, as readily acknowledged by the papers' authors. Also we thank Kjeld Schmidt for providing us with the opportunity to shape this issue and for much timely advice. RICHARD BENTLEY UWEBUSBACH DAVID KERR KLAAS SIKKEL GMDFIT