Designing a distributed collaborative environment

The features of DiCE (distributed collaborative environment) are described in terms of its flexibility in supporting various types of collaborations, and an overview of the collaboration management in DiCE is given. A collaboration is defined as an aggregation of conferences, and the functionality of connection management necessary for instantiating conferences is discussed. The networking environment, and design principles are described. The software architecture of the conferencing system is outlined, the hardware environment is described, and results are given