Integrating Synchronous and Asynchronous Interactions in Groupware Applications

It is common that, in a long-term asynchronous collaborative activity, groups of users engage in occasional synchronous sessions. In this paper, we discuss the data management requirements for supporting this common work practice. As users interact in different ways in each setting, requirements and solutions often need to be different. We present a data management system that allows to integrate a synchronous session in the context of a long-term asynchronous interaction, using the suitable data sharing techniques in each setting and an automatic mechanism to convert the long sequence of small updates produced in a synchronous session into a large asynchronous contribution. We exemplify the use of our approach with two multi-synchronous applications.