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The Technology to meet these goals

Technologies which have been integrated include:

An Enterprise Information Server and Browser, acting as a transparent intermediary to diverse sources of enterprise information, to support applications and people working cooperatively.
Process support for people and applications working together.
Document management, retrieval and imaging (based on the Oracle RDBMS)
Directory services, extending to information on roles, individuals, workgroups and their relationships (incorporating the X500 standard).
E-mail (incorporating the X400 standard).
Appropriate levels of persistence, enabling activities to be abandoned and resumed at will.
These technologies link with core desktop tools such as word-processing and spreadsheets.
Integration is within an Open client-server environment with a layered, modular architecture.


The architecture is divided into 3 layers:

The User Agent layer which provides the User Interface on client workstations.
The Core layer, running on the server platform, which provides core CSCW functionality.
The Services layer. This enables relevant CSCW-enabling services such as word-processing e-mail and spreadsheets to be integrated.

lagged cylinders diagram


Workstations and the server(s) may be distributed over local area or wide area networks. Each component in the User Agent and Core layers is encapsulated in a "Component Wrapper" Main Page