Using familiar single-user editors for collaborative editing

A number of real-time group editors have been developed as vehicles for investigating various technical issues in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Excellent as they are in serving academic purposes, those research prototypes are not (and will probably not be) widely used by ordinary users for "serious" group editing activities. The reason is primarily that they are generally not as powerful or usable as single-user editors that people are already familiar with. In this paper, we propose an approach which converts existing single-user editors to group editors without modifying their source code. As a result, different editors such as Word and GVim can be shared by a group of distributed users to edit the same document simultaneously. Users can use familiar single-user editors for collaborative editing which are allowed to be heterogeneous. Towards this end we have been working on a research project called intelligent collaboration transparency or ICT to address related technical issues. Our work compared to existing application-sharing systems especially in that it is able to interoperate heterogeneous single-user applications. We report our latest progress on this project.

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