Engineering plug-in software components to support collaborative work

Many software applications require co-operative work support, including collaborative editing, group awareness, versioning, messaging and automated notification and co-ordination agents. Most approaches hard-code such facilities into applications, with fixed functionality and limited ability to reuse groupware implementations. We describe our recent work in seamlessly adding such capabilities to component-based applications via a set of collaborative work-supporting plug-in software components. We describe a variety of applications of this technique, along with descriptions of the novel architecture, user interface adaptation and implementation techniques for the collaborative work-supporting components that we have developed. We report on our experiences to date with this method of supporting collaborative work enhancement of component-based systems, and discuss the advantages of our approach over conventional techniques.