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Taking the Work out of Workflow: Mechanisms for Document-Centered Collaboration

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ECSCW ’99

Abstract

There are two aspects to technical support for collaborative activity; support for content work and support for coordination. The design of CSCW systems must typically address both of these, combining them in a collaborative application. This approach, however, suffers from a variety of well-known problems, not least the compatibility between collaborative and single-user applications, working styles and practices. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach that makes coordination and collaborative functionality an aspect of the collaborative artifact rather than a collaborative application. We present an infrastructure and a series of application examples to illustrate the idea of documentcentered collaboration, in which coordination and collaboration are separated from and independent of applications.

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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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LaMarca, A., Edwards, W.K., Dourish, P., Lamping, J., Smith, I., Thornton, J. (1999). Taking the Work out of Workflow: Mechanisms for Document-Centered Collaboration. In: Bødker, S., Kyng, M., Schmidt, K. (eds) ECSCW ’99. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4441-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4441-4_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-5948-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4441-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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