Cognoter [] is the most mature of the applications developed as part of Xerox's Colab project [] which developed software that could be used collaboratively by small groups (of two to five members) co-located in the Colab room. Cognoter allows its users to collaboratively flesh ideas and transfer them into structured text documents. Instead of mixing private and public information in a single window and thereby creating the private scrolling problem of RTCAL, it creates separate windows for each user: a shared item organization window and a private edit window. The item organization window is used to display a set of text items, which are catch phrases describing the various ideas. They can contain other items and be associated with annotations. The edit window is used to create and modify items and their annotations. An item is transferred from the private edit window to the shared item organization window when it is committed by the user.
Once an item appears in the item organization it can be moved by any user. As in some of the other applications we will see below, other users do not see intermediate positions of the item and only see the final position after the movement was completed.
An interesting feature of Cognoter is its automatic enforcement of a meeting process. The Cognoter supports three physically distinct phases of collaboration: brainstorming, organizing, and evaluation. In the brainstorming phase, the participants propose various ideas; in the organizing phase, they collect related ideas into possible alternatives; and in the evaluation phase, they evaluate the different alternatives and deleted those that were not acceptable. Commands special to a phase are not allowed in other phases. For instance, deletion of items can be done only in the evaluation phase. Compare this process with the CLARE process.