Supporting Collaborative Information Sharing with the World Wide Web: The BSCW Shared Workspace System

The Basic Support for Cooperative Work project (BSCW) at GMD is investigating the feasibility of extending the W3 to support such collaborative working. In this paper we report on the design and implementation of the BSCW Shared Workspace system; an extended W3 server which provides basic facilities for (primarily asynchronous) collaborative information sharing, activity awareness and integration of external applications across Macintosh, PC and Unix platforms. The system integrates the simple facilities found in ftp--namely storage and retrieval of documents--with more sophisticated features such as group and member administration, check-in/-out facilities and access to meta-information regarding documents and members. In addition, the system provides a simple, event- based awareness service to inform users, at-a-glance, of the current status and past changes to information held in the workspace.