Leveraging Single-user OpenOffice Writer for Collaboration by Transparent Adaptation

Collaborative authoring of shared office documents becomes increasingly desirable for integrating collective efforts from multiple contributors. We propose to plug a generic collaborative engine into existing office applications so that advanced collaboration capabilities can be seamlessly integrated without compromising or modifying their conventional capabilities. This engine lies on application-independent data addressing and operation models to be reusable for a wide range of applications without being modified. As such, an application-dependent adaptor is required to bridge the gap between the data and operation models used by the application and engine. In this paper, we present the data addressing and operation adaptation techniques for OpenOffice Writer. These techniques have been implemented in the Writer´s adaptor for evaluation, demonstration, and usability study.