Supporting cooperative work with Viceroy

Many existing CSCW (computer supported cooperative work) applications used isolated tools which tend to ignore the existence of others and can't provide detailed state information of cooperative work, although they show a positive impact on overall productivity in cooperative work. To fully make useful of existing CSCW applications and overcome their deficiencies, this paper proposes, defines, designs and implements a cooperative work supporting environment called Viceroy, which deploys a graphical model to represent a cooperative work explicitly. Viceroy provides an infrastructure to plan, design, execute, monitor, and manage CSCW activities on a network, from which participants can get better up-to-date overview and a clear context for performing that cooperative work. Finally, the benefits of Viceroy are presented in this paper.