Conferencing and Collaborative Computing

201 tific laboratory without walls. The growing acceptance of multimedia conferencing also reflects a change in the way conferencing is promoted; it is a supplement to, not a replica of, face-to-face collaboration. A testament to the staying power of the concept of conferencing is the emergence of commercial products that have actually made inroads in the market; Silicon Graphics' InPerson, ShowMe from Sun Microsystems, Intel's ProShare, and publicly available tools that are in widespread use on the Internet and MBone [Jacob-In particular, these developments are a result of the emergence of standards for interoperability. Windowing systems, such as the X window system [Scheifler et al. 1988], configurable graphical user interfaces, like the Tk/Tcl toolkit [Ousterhout 1990, Ousterhout 1991], and widely available network application programming interfaces (APIs), such as Unix sockets [Sun Microsystems 1988], all have given rise to more generalized software platforms on top of which interoperable systems can be built. Additionally, the increased speed of processors, disks and networks have contributed to the more rapid adoption of distributed solutions and the move to include various real-time media as standard data types. Nonetheless, there are still many aspects about computer architectures that make it difficult to achieve widespread availability of these services, from the need for communication standards to seamless techniques to accommodate multiuser GUIs. There is the continued challenge to support not only small groups or moderate sized organizations [Grudin 1994], which have traditionally been the focus of most groupware systems, but much larger scale telecollaborations [Schooler 1993a]. The expectation is that integrated solutions, combining audio, video and shared workspaces, will eventually make it as easy to rendezvous electronically as it is physically. More importantly, telecollaborations must support not one, but many real-world interaction protocols. Finally, an integral part of the coming-of-age process will be the continued attention to issues beyond the scope of technology itself.