Evaluating an instant messaging protocol for digital whiteboard applications

Many whiteboard applications have been developed during the recent years. In distributed settings, where whiteboards have to be synchronized, proprietary protocols are often used for communication. Using reliable and wellknown open standards can ease integration with existing systems. After evaluating existing instant messaging protocols, we look at applying those well-established standards for the problem domain of distributed whiteboards. The presented system does not only support synchronous working modes, but also asynchronous, by consequently capturing and analyzing communication data. The presented approach goes beyond existing systems in unifying those two working modes into one system. Evaluation of this in-situ capturing shows only little influence on the system’s performance and therefore being an approach generally applicable to other problem domains.