Supporting Effective Collaborative Works Based on WebDAV

Abstract

WebDAV is an IETF standard protocol which supports asynchronous collaborative authoring on the Web. The recently published WebDAV access control protocol provides various methods of controlling the resources on a WebDAV server and their properties, helping high-level collaborative works to be performed through the WebDAV server. Based on the WebDAV access control protocol, we developed a collaborative system named CoSlide which supports exchanging and/or sharing data among the members using the system. CoSlide provides Group workspaces - the shared spaces for the members in those groups as well as personal workspaces which are the private spaces on the Web for each user. In addition, it also provides open workspaces which support additional information exchanging methods for unsubscribed users. The CoSlide client has been developed as a windows application using .Net framework. The client also provides the ability to launch an authoring application from its WebDAV view, automatically locking, and downloading the content to be edited. We constructed the server for CoSlide using Jakarta Slide - a WebDAV server supporting the WebDAV access control protocol.