An integrated approach to version control management in computer supported collaborative writing
Byong G. Lee, Kai H. Chang, N. Hari Narayanan · 1998
Computer Supported Collaborative Writing (CSCWriting) is an interactive application that allows multiple distributed users to collaborate on a shared document.To support the interaction among users, many CSCWriting tools facilitate synchronous communication.However, synchronous communication alone cannot be employed successfully due to slow network environment and various collaborative writing modes.These problems demand a new approach that aims at a simple, low-cost asynchronous collaboration environment supported by a version control system.However, since current version control techniques have been developed for single user environments, these can not be directly incorporated into CSCWriting environments.That is, these do not have the ability to address social/cognitive aspects, such as group awareness and access control.This paper describes issues regarding various physical and social artifacts required for version control in a CSCWriting environment, effective mechanisms for managing such artifacts, and an integrated approach to combining the artifacts.