Extending VNC for effective collaboration

VNC (virtual network computing) is a remote access software using RFB (remote frame buffer) protocol. VNC supports access to resources of a remote system through sharing the desktop of the remote system. In this paper, we describe an extension of VNC for effective real-time collaboration through the Internet. For effective collaboration, we provide three kinds of access authorities: administrator, worker, and spectator. The administrator controls access authorities of the users. The workers can access the remote resources provided by the collaboration server, while the spectators can not handle the remote resources, only monitoring the remote desktop of the collaboration server. To support those access authorities, the UltraVNC server and the JavaViewer are extended.