What is a Collaborative Application?

By Maurice Willey

Collaborative applications enhance the interactions between people working on shared or overlapping tasks. Examples of classic collaborative applications are those that track messages, schedules, paperwork, and documentation in legal and medical offices. In these cases, many people coordinate their efforts as they cooperate on various tasks and documents that travel different paths through the office before eventually being collected together under the cover of one case folder. (The term document is used here in a very broad sense; an x-ray image is considered to be a document.)

Basic requirements of collaborative applications are the ability to handle different types of documents; to let people work simultaneously with the same documents, perhaps in slightly different ways; and to track the progress or status of documents as people collaborate on them.

Multiple Document Types

A collaborative application needs to handle many different types of documents in order to accurately reflect the real-world processes it is tracking. While collaboration can certainly take place with a single document type, it usually involves collecting multiple kinds of documents that all pertain to a single concern. For instance, teachers and parents collaborate on their children’s education record. A child’s school folder may contain grades, recommendations, parent letters, and interviews. To handle that collaboration, an application must be able to recognize the different document types, store them appropriately, retrieve them on demand, and make sure that the various people involved in individual tasks are notified of document changes that affect them.