Customisable collaborative editing supporting the work processes of organisations

The development of customisable working environments that not only manage information and communication, but also support the work processes of organisations is very important. In this paper we describe a collaborative approach that offers customisation in terms of the modes of collaboration that can be used alternatively in different stages of a project, i.e. synchronous and asynchronous, for two main classes of documents, textual and graphical. Moreover, by using a hierarchical structure for representing the documents, we offer a flexibility of working at different granularity levels. We highlight the fact that the real-time and asynchronous modes of communication use the same basic mechanisms for maintaining consistency in the collaborative environments. # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.