WILEY

Trends in Software

7

Computer Supported Co-operative Work Edited by Michel Beaudouin-Lafon

Edited by Michel Beaudouin-Lafon Université de Paris-Sud, France Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW) reflects a dramatic change in the role of computers from a personal tool to a new medium for human communication. This book takes a closer look at various aspects of software systems, tools and techniques for CSCW. Each section analyses the latest research in the design, implementation and evaluation of software that enables and supports cooperative activities. This includes groupware tools such as workflow systems that help groups and organizations to coordinate their actions, shared editors that support several users producing and editing documents and mediaspaces that allow participants to communicate through audio and video links. The book also covers the design and implementation of these groupware systems, including groupware toolkits, software architectures and infrastructures and the role of formal methods. Building CSCW systems offers several challenges: these systems are by nature distributed; they often require near real-time response times and high-bandwidth communication (e.g. for video) over wide-area heterogeneous environments. Many traditional approaches break down under such constraints, and this book offers solutions to these problems. In addition, from a social stand point, CSCW raises new questions about the role and power of computers in daily life. The book also explains that groupware is more about people than about computers, and describes how to apply a truly user-centered approach to the design of CSCW systems. This book provides invaluable information for system engineers and researchers, including: the latest research on design, implementation and evaluation of software systems that enable and support co-operative activities other closely related issues such as the production process and how to control the communication and production by co-ordination various perspectives on groupware that are reflected in the current tools, such as real-time vs different-time.

ISBN 0-471-96736-X, 258pp, 1999, hardback, £55.00

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ISBN 0-471-96736-X