Managing and sharing collaborative files through WWW

The increasing complexity and geographical separation of design data, tools and teams have demanded for a collaborative and distributed management environment. In this paper, we present a practical system, the CFMS, which is designed to manage collaborative files on WWW. Wherever remote developers are, they can navigate the evolutions and relationships between target files, check in and check out them conveniently on web browsers using CFMS. The capabilities of CFMS include the two-level navigation mechanism for version selection, the relationship model that conceptually manages the relationships between physical files as well as the prefix-based naming scheme that can uniquely identify requested objects. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.