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Tools for transparent synchronous collaborative environments

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Abstract

Synchronous collaborative environments can provide an identical visual and operable working area among geographically separated participants. There are two basic approaches for providing a shared workspace. They are collaborative-aware approach and collaborative-unaware approach. Since the second approach allows single-user applications to be reused, most users choose to use it. Our work is based on the collaborative-unaware environment. This paper describes the design and implementation of some transparent synchronous collaborative tools. They are: (1) the latecomer support for Java applications, Java applets and JMF players (2) the client synchronization to minimize data transmission latency and (3) the lightweight multi-session support to let different collaboration groups work at the same time. These tools optimize existing transparent synchronous collaboration systems and make them more realistic, more complete and more generic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada, K1N 6N5

    Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Dongsheng Yang & Nicolas D. Georganas

Authors
  1. Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
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  2. Dongsheng Yang
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  3. Nicolas D. Georganas
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Correspondence to Abdulmotaleb El Saddik.

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El Saddik, A., Yang, D. & Georganas, N.D. Tools for transparent synchronous collaborative environments. Multimed Tools Appl 33, 217–240 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-006-0057-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-006-0057-8

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