Support for Collaborative Authoring via Email: The MESSIE Environment

Abstract

MESSIE is a collaborative authoring environment to support the production of large-scale document by teams of geographically distributed groups of authors working with heterogenous systems. The environment allows authors to submit text at various stages of gestation (e.g. list of topics, first draft) to a shared filestore via email. All authors collaborating on a document can read each other's contributions, and add suggestions, comments and additional material directly to the document. The system integrates automatically answered electronic mail, shared file store administration, and a version control tool in a UNIX environment. The paper describes design and implementation strategy, and reports observations and a number of changes which were made during a 4-month trial period with three collaborative authoring teams.