The Impact of Group Communication Paradigms on Groupware Support
F. Cosquer and P. Veríssimo
Selected portions of this report were published in the Proceedings of
the IEEE CS Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems
Cheju Island, Korea, August 28-30, 1995.
Abstract
Group Communication Paradigms play an important role in the
management of group activities, such as reliable information
diffusion in support of replication and cooperation. They
consequently provide an appropriate framework for groupware
applications support. To meet the new challenges posed by large
scale distributed settings like the Internet, a new generation of
group communication systems has emerged, built on the lessons learnt
from early prototypes. This paper presents new services/features
proposed by this new generation of systems and shows their relevance
in the context of groupware support. Experiments with a cooperative
application demonstrate how the features of a group-based system
like NavTech can be used to enhance the functionality of
groupware applications. NavTech is a modern group
communication and activity support system developed at INESC.
Also available as
INESC AR/09-95 (gzip postscript).