Take CoVer: exploiting version support in cooperative systems

Current CSCW applications support one or more modes of cooperative work. The selection of and transition between these modes is usually placed on the users. At IPSI we built the SEPIA cooperative hypermedia authoring environment supporting a whole range of situations arising during collaborative work and the smooth transitions between them. While early use of the system shows the benefits of supporting smooth transitions between different collaborative modes, it also reveals some deficits regarding parallel work, management of alternative documents, or reuse of document parts. We propose to integrate version support to overcome these limitations. This leads to a versioned data management and an extended user interface enabling concurrent users to select a certain state of their work, to be aware of related changes, and to cooperate with others either asynchronously or synchronously.