Survey of collaborative environments

Computers and networks are already very common and are on their way to becoming ubiquitous. Their impact on our lives will only grow as technology improves, and new uses and services become available. An active field of research investigates interaction and collaboration between people as afforded by the growth and prevalence of computers and networks. This research, termed collaborative environments (CE), draws from many different disciplines including multimedia, distributed systems and networking. CE encompass a variety of applications, each with its own set of requirements. Many of those requirements address issues in scalability, efficient communication, quality of service, synchronization and security. This paper presents a brief survey on state-of-the-art of the research in the field of collaborative environments as applicable to those issues.