Building multi-device, component-based, thin-client groupware: issues and experiences

  • Authors:
  • John Grundy;Xing Wang;John Hosking

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • AUIC '02 Proceedings of the Third Australasian conference on User interfaces - Volume 7
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

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 thin-client 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.