Research from the Trenches: Fault Tolerant Support in Real-Time Collaborative Editing Systems

Groupware systems let physically dispersed teams collaborate on common tasks over distance and time. A real-time groupware system requires all users to be present at their respective sites at the same time. A non-real-time groupware system, however, lets users work on common tasks at different times. Real-time collaborative editing systems that enable groups of geographically distributed users to simultaneously view and edit shared documents, make groupware applications more practical. This usefulness becomes even more pronounced when users can use real-time collaborative editing systems on the Internet.