As corporations and organizations become more distributed enterprises, the use of groupware applications as part of day-to-day activities becomes more prevalent. How to build groupware applications so that they work as expected, both as the developer expects and the community of users expect, is a challenge that must be addressed in order for groupware applications to be adapted as part of daily business activities. In practice, assumptions made by the developer may not match the expectations of the users.
This paper details a model for collecting a replayable transcript of online collaboration. This transcript can then be used to study the interaction, through techniques such as ethnographic analysis. We also present software frameworks that implement this model. An example of an analysis is presented, as are two examples of experimental groupware applications that use this model.
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