Group Rendezvous in a Synchronous, Collaborative Environment

Before a session in a synchronous, collaborative environment can really start, various actions have to be performed: users have to be informed about planned sessions, network access paths between session participants have to be determined, etc. In the following, we call all these actions group rendezvous. In existing groupware systems, the group rendezvous is often neglected, i.e. it is assumed that a team has already formed, session information has been distributed and network paths are known. In reality, this assumption often does not hold: members with dial-up connections are not permanently online, if they get their network addresses from an address pool, e.g. via a network access provider, they are difficult to find even when they are online. This paper describes a fully decentralised group rendezvous system, which addresses these problems. Besides session distribution, the system has a component for resolving variable network addresses. It has been integrated into the synchronous groupware system DreamTeam [RU98].