Flexible Management of Shared Groupware Objects

Synchronous groupware brings together users, which are geographically distributed, but connected via a network. In this paper we describe an object manager, which simplifies synchronous groupware development. It offers a variety of services for controlling an application's shared data, including flexible object distribution, flexible object coupling, latecomer support and configurable concurrency control. After a brief description of the development platform and the object manager basic concepts we focus on its configurable services, e.g. consistency maintenance and object coupling. A description of the runtime architecture and directions for future work conclude the paper.