Instant messaging applications that convey presence awareness are quickly becoming some of the most popular groupware applications. They support lightweight and intermittent interactions that allow users to quickly move between a personal and a collective space, thus blurring the traditional distinction between synchronous and asynchronous systems. Often, however, the focus of collaboration is not another person, but a shared resource that is being produced in collaboration. Thus, rather than being interested in the presence and status of a collaborator, our main interest might be whether a given document is now available for one to read or review, or if such resource has changed since it was last visited. In this paper we describe Doc2U, a system that provides presence awareness of resources stored in the Web. We describe use scenarios that motivated its development and its current implementation as an extended service of a Web server. The tool forms part of the services currently being developed to support collaborative authoring on the WWW under the PINAS platform.
['Alberto L. Morán', 'Jesús Favela', 'A.M. Martinez', 'Dominique Decouchant']
Document presence notification services for collaborative writing