Collaborative Virtual Workspace Overview

Introduction

The Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) is a prototype collaborative computing environment, designed to support temporally and geographically dispersed work teams. From a user's point of view, CVW provides a persistent virtual space within which applications, documents and people are directly accessible in rooms, floors and buildings. From a technical point of view, it is a framework for integrating diverse collaborative capabilities.

To a user, a CVW is a building that is divided into floors and rooms, where each room provides a context for communication and document sharing. CVW allows people to gather in rooms to talk through chat or audio/video conferencing and to share text and URLs with one another with their chat. (See figure 1 below.) Defining rooms as the basis for communication means that users are not required to set up sessions or know user locations; they need only enter a room. If users choose to communicate through audio, video or text, then the communication session is established automatically for them. Users can also lock rooms and communicate privately within and between rooms.

Rooms are also the basis for document sharing. Users can place documents of different types into a room, allowing anyone else in that room to read the document or view information about the document (such as creator, description, creation date, modified date, last modified by). Persistence is supported because the rooms exist even when no one is in them. Consequently, the document remains in the room for future visitors to see until some authorized user moves or deletes it.

Document types include whiteboards, URLs, notes and other documents edited through the user's local applications (e.g., word processor, spreadsheet). Documents that can be edited through local applications are managed through a document server within CVW. The document server provides a universally available file space (ensuring a document is available even if the owner's file space is not) and enforces single-user editing through document lock while editing. It also tracks information about who has edited a document and when, and allows each editor to summarize changes upon saving.

Figure 1. CVW Client Interface

Rooms and Floors

The metaphor of a building with rooms and floors provides the representations of the collaborative space within CVW. Each room provides context for collaborations within it. Floors and rooms may be named as appropriate, and room descriptions can be provided to provide additional context for the room. A graphical "map" display of the floor plan is provided to help visualize the collaboration space.  Users can navigate through the virtual building with the graphical map or with a textual command. Additionally, users can navigate by joining a specific user, without knowing their current location in CVW.

Rooms contain people and objects. The types of objects CVW supports are:

• folders
• room recorders (e.g., note takers) that record public text chatter that occurs within the room
• notes (simple text notepad)
• documents (e.g., word processor, spreadsheet, graphics, binary, postscript, URL)
• whiteboards (shared annotation surface)

Room Access

CVW provides the ability to restrict room access, based on an access control list. Often, the access control list is defined by a "group", although specific individuals may be added to the room's access control list. For example, a group can be created (and assigned a set of users) and assigned access to a particular room, and any users not belonging to the group are restricted from accessing the room.

Text-based Communications

CVW's textual communications capabilities are extensive, providing the ability to communicate and express one's self in a manner similar to verbal communication. The textual communications capabilities that CVW provides include:

• the ability to direct communication from one person to another or from one person to a group of people
• the ability to privately communicate with people in the same room or another person in another room
• the ability to express in a 'non-verbal' manner (e.g., John nods) to all people in a room or privately to another person
• the ability to paste a text selection from another application to the people in the room
• the ability to privately paste a text selection from another application to a particular person
• the ability to send a URL (web page reference) as a hot link to the people in the room (clicking on the hot link in the room scrollback opens your web browser and automatically displays the web page)

Audio and Video Conferencing

CVW provides multipoint audio and video conferencing capabilities. The audio and video conferencing is self-configuring on a per room basis, providing conferencing capabilities with other the other people in the room. Users do not have to establish conference sessions or know other users' locations to use audio and video; they need only enter a room. CVW also provides a phone capability for private audio discussions between two people.

Room Scrollback

All interaction that occurs within a given room in CVW is displayed to the user in the textual scrollback window. This includes all text communication and activities which occur within the room (e.g., notices of when people enter and leave the room, notices of when someone places a document in the room). Users can customize the appearance of the text that appears in their individual scrollback by color-coding it.  A users can set different colors for:

• text chat contributed by a specific person
• text chat directed to the user
• private chat directed to the user
• specific text expressions

CVW also provides the ability to save the text scrollback or a selection of the text scrollback and export it to a file. CVW also provides the ability to perform basic searching of the scrollback window contents.

Room Recording

CVW provides a room recorder (e.g., note taker) capability which captures the public text communications that occur within a room. Users have the ability at any time to create a personal transcript of the current recorder session.

Data Objects

CVW supports the creation and sharing of a variety of data, including notes, documents (e.g., word processor, spreadsheet, graphics), URLs, folders, and whiteboards. Users can import files into CVW's shared document space to share with other team members. Data objects in CVW can be manipulated in a variety of ways, including:

• the ability to set an access list on the item to control who has edit permissions
• the ability to place a reference item in a room and lock it down so that no on can take it
• the ability to move an item between the room and their personal (private) folder
• the ability to give an item to another person in CVW
• the ability to copy any item to which the user has permissions

Shared Whiteboard

CVW provides persistent shared whiteboards that enable multiple people to view an image (such as a map) and annotate the image together in real time. The whiteboards do not disappear after the session ends, and can be opened and re-used to continue the work process. Whiteboards maintain attribution of the annotator, so it is easy to see who marked up the whiteboard surface and how. The contents of whiteboards can be printed or exported to a file so that it can be included in another product such as a report.

Locating Users, Rooms, and Data

With many users navigating around the many rooms that can exist in CVW, it can be difficult to know how to find someone, know if that person is available, or where that person left a document. To simplify finding people, rooms, and data, CVW provides:

• a search capability that allows the search of different document types, rooms, or people based on name matching (All matches are displayed in a window with descriptive information about each match.)
• the ability find out which users are currently logged in, how long since they have been active, and their current location within the CVW

Proxies

Proxies enable people to be in two rooms at the same time in the virtual building. A person can place his/her proxy in any room that they have permissions to enter. Through the proxy, the user can communicate textually and share text and URLs with anyone in the proxy's room.  If more interaction is required, users can quickly switch places with their proxy and use the other features of CVW in the proxy's room (e.g., audio/video conferencing, documents).

Last update: 13 October 2000

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