A general collaborative editing platform based on file locking mechanism

With the development of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), people's work has become much more efficient by using groupware systems that support collaborative editing. However, many collaborative editing systems only support one type of documents and are sometimes even more difficult to use than traditional software. As a result, we designed and implemented a general collaborative editing platform, which supports collaborative editing of any type of documents by using users' familiar software. The platform is designed in Client/Server style, where the shared document is stored on the server and the users access the document from the client side. File locking mechanism is used to solve the concurrency problem in our platform. Three modules of concurrency control and the design of our platform are described in this paper. The experiment results showed that our platform made a good performance for collaborative editing.