Course Structure and Syllabus

In the first part of the course, we will discuss a variety of influential collaborative systems, looking first at collaborative applications and then at the more general, collaboration infrastructures. In the second part, we will delve in-depth into issues raised by our discussion of collaborative systems. We will look at both design issues and implementation issues.

Here is a tentative 15-week schedule:

• Introduction - Definition, Motivation, Views of Collaboration Systems, Problems, Issues, Systems, Related Disciplines, Projects.

• Collaborative applications - Talk vs Mail vs File systems. Mail++.

  Talk++.

  File++.

• Talk + File.

  File + Mail.

  Talk + Mail. Taxonomies of Collaborative Applications: Time/Space, Extended Time Space, Task/Environment, Coordination Levels.

• Infrastructures: Traditional Distributed Systems. State-of-the-art systems.

• Shared Object Systems.

• Shared Window Systems. Shared Toolkits.

• Process Control Systems. Software buses.

• Session Management. Transactions.

• Advanced Transactions.

• Collaborative Transactions: Coupling and Concurrency Control.

• Diffing and Merging.

• Access Control and Undo.

• Distributed Architecture.

• Display Consistency and Undo Algorithms.

• Interoperability.