Chapter – 19 (Unit 6)

Groupware
 CONTENTS
• What is groupware
• Types of groupware
• computer-mediated communication
• meeting and decisions support systems
• shared applications and artefacts
• Models of groupware
• Implementation issues
 WHAT IS GROUPWARE?

• Software specifically designed

• to support group working
• with cooperative requirements in mind

• Groupware can be classified by

• when and where the participants are working
• the function it performs for cooperative work
 THE TIME/SPACE MATRIX

Classify groupware by:

when the participants are working,
at the same time or not
where the participants are working,
at the same place or not
same different
place place
Common names for axes:
same
time
Same time: synchronous
Different time: asynchronous
different
place
Same Place: co-located
Different Place: remote
TIME/SPACE MATRIX
same different
place place

same face-to-face
telephone
time conversation

different
post-it note Letter/Email
Time
TYPES OF GROUPWARE SYSTEM

• computer-mediated communication

• meeting and decisions support systems

• shared applications and artefacts

 CLASSIFICATION OF
GROUPWARE BY FUNCTIONS
Cooperative work involves:
Participants who are working
Artefacts upon which they work

understanding

direct
participants P communication
P
control and
feedback

artefacts of work A
 WHAT INTERACTIONS DOES
A TOOL SUPPORT?
meeting and decision
support systems
– common understanding
understanding

participants P direct
P computer-mediated
communication communication
– direct communication
control and between participants
feedback

artefacts of work A
shared applications
and artefacts
– control and feedback
with shared work objects
COMPUTER-MEDIATED
COMMUNICATION
email and bulletin boards
structured message systems
text messaging
video, virtual environments
 EMAIL AND BULLETIN
BOARDS
• asynchronous/remote

• familiar and most successful groupware

• Recipients of email:
direct in To: field
copies in Cc: field
 STRUCTURED MESSAGE
SYSTEMS
• asynchronous/remote

• `super' email
– cross between email and a database
• sender
– fills in special fields
• recipient
– filters and sorts incoming mail
based on field contents
Type: Assignment Announcement
To: all
From: ABC
Subject: HCI PPT
Time: 2:00 Tuesday
Place: D014
Speaker: XYZ
Title: The Honey Pot
Text: abcvsgdjdklll
 TXT IS GR8

• Instant messaging
• 1996 – ICQ small Israeli company
• now millions
Hi, u there
• more like conversation
yeh, had a good time yday?
uhu
want to meet later?

• SMS
• originally a feature of internal management protocol
• short messages (160 chars) and text with numbers
• no-one predicted mass adoption!!
• now phones with cameras for MMS
 VIDEO CONFERENCES AND
COMMUNICATION
• Synchronous/remote
• Technology:
• ISDN + video compression
• internet, web cams

• often cheaper than face-to-face meetings

(telecommunications costs vs. air flights)
 VIDEO ISSUES …

not a substitute for face-to-face meetings

• small field of view
• lack of reciprocity
• poor eye contact
 WEB-VIDEO

• Video-conferencing – expensive technology

• But internet (almost) free!
• web-cams
• used for face-to-face chat
• for video-conferencing
• for permanent web-cams
• low bandwidth
• pictures ‘block out’ … not terrible
• audio more problematic
 COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL
ENVIRONMENTS (CVES)
• Meet others in a virtual world

• MUDs (Multi-user domains)

• 2D/3D places to meet on the web
• users represented as avatars
 MEETING
AND
DECISION SUPPORT
SYSTEMS
 DEFINITION
• Meeting: Group of people coming together to
work/discuss over a particular topic
• Decision Support System: Computer based
information systems that provide interactive
information support to managers and business
professionals during decision making process.
 MEETING AND DECISION
SUPPORT
In design, management and research,
we want to:
• generate ideas
• develop ideas
• record ideas
primary emphasis
– common understanding
 THREE TYPES OF
SYSTEM
Argumentation Tools - disagreements and reasoning
• asynchronous co-located
• recording the arguments for design decisions
Meeting rooms
• synchronous co-located
• electronic support for face-to-face meetings Shared
drawing surfaces
• synchronous remote
• drawing board at a distance
 ARGUMENTATION
TOOLS
• asynchronous co-located
• hypertext like tools to record design rationale
• Two purposes:
• reminding the designers of the reasons for decisions
• communicating rationale between design teams

• Mode of collaboration:
• very long term
• sometimes synchronous use also
 MEETING ROOMS
• synchronous co-located
electronic support for face-to-face meetings
• individual terminals (often recessed)
• large shared screen (electronic whiteboard)
• special software
• U or C shaped seating around screen
Various modes:
• brainstorming, private use, WYSIWIS
WYSIWIS – ‘what you see is what I see’
• all screens show same image
• any participant can write/draw to screen
C – SHAPED SEATING
U – SHAPED SEATING
 TYPICAL MEETING ROOM

shared
screen
 MEETING CAPTURE
• use ordinary
whiteboard
• detector and
special pens
• LCD projection
on whiteboard
• low-cost alternative
to dedicated meeting room
 ISSUES FOR
COOPERATION
Argumentation tools
• concurrency control
• two people access the same node
• one solution is node locking
• notification mechanisms
• knowing about others' changes

Meeting rooms
• floor holders one or many?
• floor control policies
• who can write and when?
• solution: locking + social protocol
• group pointer
• for deictic reference (this and that)
SHARED WORK SURFACES
• synchronous remote
At simplest, meeting rooms at a distance, but …
• additional audio/video for social protocols and discussion
• network delays can be major problem

Additional special effects:

• participants write onto large video screen
• problems with parallax
• shadow of other participant's hands appears on screen
• electronic image integrated with video and paper images
Example: Team Work Station
• remote teaching of Japanese calligraphy
• student's strokes on paper overlaid with video of instructor's
strokes
 SHARED APPLICATIONS AND
ARTIFACTS
Various shared applications:
1. Shared PCs and shared window systems
2. Shared Editors
3. Shared Diaries
 1. SHARED PCS & SHARED WINDOW
SYSTEMS

A: SHARED PCs

• Shared PCs & Shared window systems allow ordinary application to be the
focus of co-operative work.
• The idea of a hared a PC is that we have two(or more) computers which
functions as if they were one.
• Its just like a large meeting room without the large shared screen.
• Their Keystrokes and movements are similarly relayed on us.
 1. SHARED PCS & SHARED
WINDOW SYSTEMS

B: Shared Window System

It is similar except, rather than the whole screen , it
is individual windows which are shared.
 1. SHARED PCS & SHARED
WINDOW SYSTEMS

Used of Shared PC and window system:

•These facilities may be used within the same room,
•Alternatively, they may be usedin conjunction with telephone or video
connections at a distance.
• Shared PCs and window systems have two main uses. One is where the
focus is on
1 -- the documents being processed
2 – technical support.
 2. SHARED EDITORS
• A shared editor is an editor (for text or graphics) which is
collaboration aware.
• It knows that it is being shared.
• Shared editors may be text based or include graphics.
• These problems are precisely why the principle of WYSIWIS –
what you see is what I see – is used in meeting rooms.
• Even minor differences between displays, such as lags between
the appearance of one participant’s typing on the others’ screens
can cause severe problems.
• WYSIWIS is not always appropriate.
 3. SHARED DAIRIES
• The idea of a shared diary or shared calendar is simple.
• Each person uses a shared electronic diary, similar to that often
found on PCs and pocket organizers.
• When you want to arrange a meeting, the system searches
everyone’s diaries for one or more free slots.
• One such area is privacy.
• E.g : Are people allowed to look at your diary to find free slots?
If so, do they just see ‘busy’ or can they see exactly what you are
doing?
 FRAMEWORK FOR GROUPWARE

• In this section we will discuss several frameworks for understanding

the role of groupware.
• One use for these is as a classification mechanism, which can help us
discuss groupware issues.
 TIME/SPACE MATRIX AND
ASYNCHRONOUS WORKING

• This matrix has become a common language amongst the CSCW

community.
• It can also be useful during design as one of the earliest decisions is
what sort of interaction you are planning.
• The design space for synchronous interaction is entirely different from
that for asynchronous.
• Unsynchronized systems
it makes little difference
whether or not the
participants are operating
at the same time.
• For Synchronized
systems, the actual time
of use becomes more
important.
 SHARED INFORMATION

GRANULARITY
•Looking first at object chunk size, some systems
operate at a very finegrain,allowing participants to edit
the same sentence, or even the same word in a
sentence.
•At the other extreme, shared file systems may often
have locks so that only one user can edit a file at the
same time.
•The granularity here is the document.
 LEVELS OF SHARING

• At one extreme are WYSIWIS systems, such

as shared window systems and many
• meeting rooms. In these, the participants all
see exactly the same presentation of the data.
Example, two people may be
viewing the same part of a
database, but one person sees
it presented as a graph, and
the other in tabular form.We
thus have three levels, as
depicted in Figure
 AWARENESS

• An important issue in groupware and CSCW is

awareness – generally having some
• feeling for what other people are doing or have been
doing.
• There are a number of different kinds of awareness,
summarized in Figure
• First we may want to know who is
there (a)
• You may also want to be aware of
what is happening to shared
objects (b).
• If we know how the change
happened (c), then we may be in a
better position to infer the reasons
for the change.
• These two together (b and c) are
called workplace awareness.
EXAMPLE
1. Handling updates from several users.
2. Limited bandwidths and delays of
network.
3. Feedback delays
4. Time-slice problems
ARCHITECTURES FOR
GROUPWARE

• Centralized Architectures
• Replicated Architectures
 CENTRALIZED ARCHITECTURE

• Type of client-server architecture

• The screen accepts participant’s input. The server holds
all the application’s data.
• Server runs on a central computer
• Master-Slave architecture: One of the clients’
workstation may act as a server as well
Centralized
Architecture
REPLICATED ARCHITECTURE

• Each user’s workstation runs its own copy of application

• Performance advantages due to distribution
• Difficult to program.
• Race condition a common problem- concurrency control
mechanisms need to be used.
• Adv- local feedback provision facility
 SHARED WINDOW
ARCHITECTURE

• Similar to groupware architecture, but with some

special features.
• Determination of how separate events are
merged- floor control and relinquishing the floor
• Disadvantages- large data structures and network
delays
 Shared X
Architecture of
Linux
 FEEDTHROUGH AND
NETWORK TRAFFIC
• Feedthrough- reflection of one user’s action on the
other user’s screen.
• What if we want to send updates for each mouse
movement?
• Solution:
 Send a broadcast message
 Increase the granularity
ROBUSTNESS AND SCALABILITY

1. Failures in the network workstation or operating

systems
2. Errors in programming the shared application
3. Unforeseen sequences of events, such as the race
condition
4. The system does not scale as the number of users or
rate of activity increases.
 SERVER FAULTS
Server Crashes!!!

What do you do?

1. Transaction logging- it can recover
the most recent file, ignoring any
partially written file.
2. Have multiple servers.
 WORKSTATION
FAULTS
The three R’s
• ROBUST
• RECONFIGURE
• RESYNCHRONIZE