Action view mechanisms for cooperative work environments

In this paper a new view mechanism, called action view, is presented. It is developed for the VIEW Office, a system which can be used to realize a distributed virtual office environment. The mechanism supports coordination of users by means of the database technology. For security/privacy and other reasons it is not desirable to show all contents of a user's screen to other users. The action view mechanism makes it possible to select exported screen objects. Histories of actions shown on a screen are recorded, thus coordination among users working at different time is supported. The recording uses a symbolic form and histories' elements are marked by timestamps. Redundant operations can be removed from a record.