Coordination and Tailorability Issues in the design of a Generic Large Scale Groupware Platform

Tailorabilit y or adaptabilit y is commonly accepted as a fundamental property of modern and flexible CSCW systems. In order to match the differences in organizational structures, these systems have strong requirements in terms of dynamic reconfiguration and adaptation. This work is concerned with the design and implementation of a tailorable generic distributed system platform for large scale CSCW. We argue in favor of an approach for the tailorabilit y support, focusing different perspectives and emphasis according to different support levels. This approach can help in a better understanding of different structuring levels involved in the support of adaptabilit y. We discuss and ilustrate how these different perspectives are present in the proposed integrated framework and we exemplify the usage of a component model (JavaBeans) as a candidate to build software components for groupware, dealing with the different recognized structuring levels of the tailorability support.