Building Multi-Device, Component-based, Thin-client Groupware: Issues and Experiences

The use of groupware, or collaborative work-supporting technologies, has become wide-spread, but many existing groupware systems are too difficult to integrate with domain-specific software applications, only work for specific user interface hardware, or provide inappropriate, thick-client architectural solutions. We describe a set of server-side software components we have developed providing a variety of thin-client groupware solutions (chat, email, annotation, to-do lists, notification etc). These components provide HTML and WML-based thinclient user interfaces and can be readily “plugged into” the server-side architectures of domain-specific applications. We focus on the key issues of designing and realising the user interfaces for such groupware solutions and report on our experiences to date.