Users' experiences in collaborative writing using Collaboratus, an Internet-based collaborative work

This paper reviews several user experiences that researchers at the University of Arizona have had in building Internet-based tools to support collaborative writing. First, the technological framework for an advanced collaborative writing tool called Collaboratus is presented. Next, we review the tools that make up Collaboratus, and then provide an overview of the various user experiences we have had. Finally, many suggestions are provided for developing the next generation of collaborative writing tools.

1.0 Introduction

This paper reviews user experiences involving Collaboratus, an Internet-based collaborative tool produced at the Center for the Management of Information (CMI) at the University of Arizona. While this tool supports many group-oriented activities, we have focused this paper on experiences in supporting distributed collaborative writing (CW) on the Internet (eWriting). Additional experiences with collaborative modeling can be reviewed in [1].