Application cooperating: issues and approaches

By inserting into the mechanism of existing application sharing systems, we have found that almost all the existing application sharing systems cannot both support participants´ concurrent operation and provide the characteristics previously seen only in collaboration-aware systems. To overcome their limitations, we propose a novel approach called application cooperating. It can convert single-user, legacy CAD applications into cooperative CAD applications so that group members discuss or modify concurrently the design result generated by single-user CAD applications. The main feature of our approach is: it not only retains the original functions of the cooperated application, but also supports the cooperative work. We first discuss the issues and approaches of our solution. Then an example of an application cooperating system is given.