Applications of Stateless Client Systems in Collaborative Enterprises

This paper identifies the current difficulties faced by the IT professionals working for collaborative enterprises and explains how we exploit and extend the so-called stateless client systems to support those individuals in cooperative work. Stateless client systems are the software tools that separate the display interface from the application logic in windowing systems. They embed a client/server architecture, where the server executes all applications and the client simply presents the frame buffers or screen images to the user and accepts user input. Since the entire system state is preserved in the server, the client becomes stateless. By providing these stateless clients with suitable coordination mechanism, we enable geographically separated users to share workspaces and applications in a work session. And by recording the messages flowing between the client and the server, we enable temporally separated users to search for and playback previous work sessions to share knowledge and experience.