Document presence notification services for collaborative writing

Instant messaging applications that convey presence awareness are quickly becoming some of the most popular groupware applications. They support lightweight and intermittent interactions that allow users to quickly move between a personal and a collective space, thus blurring the traditional distinction between synchronous and asynchronous systems. Often, however, the focus of collaboration is not another person, but a shared resource that is being produced in collaboration. Thus, rather than being interested in the presence and status of a collaborator, our main interest might be whether a given document is now available for one to read or review, or if such resource has changed since it was last visited. In this paper we describe Doc2U, a system that provides presence awareness of resources stored in the Web. We describe use scenarios that motivated its development and its current implementation as an extended service of a Web server. The tool forms part of the services currently being developed to support collaborative authoring on the WWW under the PINAS platform