WebDesk - Collaboration Support for Distributed Projects

This paper describes the rationale and emerging architecture of WebDesk, a system integrating the three communication paradigms - the asynchronous, synchronous, and publishing - into a single homogeneous environment. The goal is to create a system which makes work independent of geographic location. The initial area of application, and source of requirements, is the "distributed knowledge intensive engineering project", which we believe shows many characteristics which make computer based communication a suitable means for keeping it together: input as well as output is immaterial, (software, specifications, drawings); they are already heavily computerized; and, finally, they are almost always rather large team efforts. We also discuss architectural issues of WebDesk, what technology to use and what is the background and constituting components. Some keywords in this case are World Wide Web, Mbone, and Java-technology. Collaboration and Distributed Multimedia 2 of 27 WebDesk - Collaboration Support for Distributed Project