Synchronite - A Service for Real-Time Lightweight Collaboration

Ad hoc collaboration across organizational boundaries is gaining importance. In a networked world, organizations interact across diverse system landscapes with partners and customers. Traditionally, facilitating the collaboration of dispersed participants in heterogeneous environments required the same software on all client systems. This entry barrier can be lowered by leveraging the ubiquitous web browser as a platform. Loosely coupled teams benefit from asynchronous tools, e.g. wikis, but often support for more immediate interaction is required to effectively apply collective skills and develop a common understanding of shared artifacts. In this paper, we present a lightweight, application-agnostic collaboration service that provides a real-time collaboration layer on top of existing single user web applications supporting synchronous work at a distance. Applying innovative techniques, which only rely on functionality natively supported by modern web browsers, technical issues impeding clients to be integrated into the collaboration environment are avoided and ad hoc collaboration is facilitated.