Flexible user interface coupling in a collaborative system

An important issue in collaborative systems is the kind of sharing or coupling among the various windows displaying a shared workspace. We have developed a flexible coupling model that allows users to control severat aspects of the coupling among shared windows including which values in these windows are coupled, when changes to these values are broadcast and received, how “correct” a value must be before it is broadcast or received, which users see the same view of a vatue, and whether a user can specify coupling parameters for other users. In this paper, we argue that a collaborative system must support flexible coupling, identify some of the issues in the design of SyStems supporting flexible coupling, describe and illustrate our approach to flexible coupling, and present conclusions and directions for future work.