Creating web based self-service groupware management software: Case study of PASSENGER conference management system

This paper presents our experience in developing an innovative web-based groupware management system which supports users of spatially distributed teams in creating and customizing their own sessions. Our motivation in this work is to create a management system for collaborative situations to be controlled mainly by the users themselves as we believe that self-service conference creation, self-service conference information publishing, self-service join/leave, and conference video/audio conversation are the key features inside a good self-service web-based groupware. The work described in this paper is based on our experiences in the development of the synchronous groupware PASSENGER and our analysis of user roles in all phases of synchronous cooperation. We expand this model by a Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model in order to provide enhanced functionalities for the setup of conferences by the users themselves prior to a session. Furthermore, the users are be able to control the session during runtime. Unlike other traditional RBAC models in which all user settings are more or less fixed, our solution provides a more flexible approach that allows dynamic configurations and adaptations.