Supporting document organization and security in distributed collaborative authoring systems through the use of collaborations

Most traditional collaborative authoring tools offer some degree of document security and concurrency control. Document security is usually accomplished by allowing users to maintain private windows and to assign private ownership to files, perhaps through operating system mechanisms. Shared portions of a document can be manipulated through shared windows. Some form of concurrency control, such as a locking mechanism, is usually used to provide editors of a shared document with a consistent view of the document. However, few implementations focus on providing security for a document produced by a limited group of collaborators. Instead, these systems provide access to either the owner, or everyone. This paper discusses an organizational paradigm known the Collaboration. Collaborations facilitate group organization, document security, and concurrency control, not through major changes in the operating system or through the introduction of new network protocols, but instead, through features already present in the UNIX operating system and existing network protocols. This paper will also briefly discuss how the Distributed Collaborative Writing Aid (DCWA), a prototype groupware suite, uses the Collaboration paradigm to accomplish these goals.