GroupWeb: a WWW browser as real time groupware
Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The design of an interactive online help desk in the Alexandria Digital Library
WACC '99 Proceedings of the international joint conference on Work activities coordination and collaboration
Just what they need, just when they need it: an introduction to embedded assistance
SIGDOC '01 Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation
The status of helpdesk support
Communications of the ACM - Internet abuse in the workplace and Game engines in scientific research
Notification for shared annotation of digital documents
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Creating and sharing Web notes via a standard browser
ACM SIGCUE Outlook
Web-Application Development Using the Model/View/Controller Design Pattern
EDOC '01 Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Enterprise Distributed Object Computing
Ontology-based Web Annotation Framework for HyperLink Structures
WISEW '02 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (Workshops) - (WISEw'02)
A framework for awareness support in groupware systems
Computers in Industry - Special issue: Knowledge sharing in collaborative design environments
Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Interactive Annotations in Web-Based Learning Systems
ICALT '04 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
“Web-Com”: Interactive Browser for Web-Based Education
IEICE - Transactions on Information and Systems
Program annotations: feedback for students learning to program
ACE '06 Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 52
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Existing web-based help systems that provide interactive real-time assistance to end-users exhibit considerable limitations. Some of these limitations are related to the presence of invasive features in these systems, the asynchronous activities between the end-user and the technical support staff during a task-related help session, and the application-specific nature of these systems. The latter limitation in particular restricts the portability of these web-based help systems to other web applications. Despite advances in web development paradigms such as the workflow-based Model View Controller (MVC), and key technology ingredients such as synchronous web annotation services, we have not found any work that combines these technologies to address the above mentioned limitations. In this work we have designed and implemented a web-based help system as an abstract layer that can be seamlessly integrated with the architectural layers of any web application that is instantiated using the workflow-based MVC development paradigm. This layer uses the use cases of the instantiated application to ensure that task-related activities are synchronized during a help session. Our web-based help system also includes features to deliver instructive aids to end-users in the form of visual web annotations. In this paper we describe, using an example, the design and implementation of our system, discuss its limitations, and recommend directions for future work.