The Collaborative Multi-User Editor Project Iris

Abstract

The collaborative editing of documents by teams is a very common task nowadays. Writing groups are often distributed over many locations because of the globalization of organizations and the increasing interdisciplinarity of tasks. Since many writers already use computers for their jobs, providing computer support for the collaborative writing process has been identified as an important goal. Numerous tools for computer supported collaborative writing have already emerged but in most cases have not come into widespread usage. As the main reason for this lack, incorrect assumptions about the needs of the collaborating users have been identified. The goal of our current research is to identify and to satisfy the real needs of writers collaborating in wide area network environments. In accordance with the results of several studies on collaborative writing our approach is to provide as much flexibility and integrability as possible for the user. Therefore we propose an integrated environment with a core data and information management service and several different tools and user interfaces around it. The supported classes for document content and structure can be easily extended by new content types and new document structure types because of the open architecture. For the same reason it is possible to integrate standard editor applications as user interfaces for editing document parts. For evaluating our results, we are building a collaborative multi-user multimedia editing environment that fulfills all the requirements. In this report the architecture and concepts of that editing environment named Iris are presented.