Design considerations in choosing operations for building groupware systems (abstract)

We report our experiences from building a prototype toolkit, called DistEdit, for building interactive group editors in distributed environments. Based on our experience in building the toolkit, we found that some design solutions that are commonly used in single-user editors are not necessarily appropriate in group editors. Furthermore, design of group editors requires a better understanding of the semantics of editing operations than in the corresponding single-user editors. These semantics are useful for providing a variety of services, such as undo, concurrency control, and selective replay. This position paper is presented in the context of text editors; however, many of the ideas presented here also apply to other types of group editors.