This paper reviews software available to aid individuals who wish to work together on the development of documents. As the popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW) grows, interest in software to support information sharing and collaboration grows as well. In reality, there are vast differences in the types of software available and in the complexity of that software. In the materials that follow we try to bring some coherence to the range of capabilities people are looking for and to the software available to meet these needs.
One of the difficulties encountered in attempting to describe the software available in this area is that before one has finished a one month review, it is relatively assured that the software reviewed will have been enhanced and new software will have arrived in the market place. For that reason we focus more on providing a framework for a set of characteristics collaborative software products. We hope that this will allow the interested reader to review specific products and make judgements about their utility to given applications. Where we do look at specific products, the focus is less on evaluations of individual products and more on conceptually defining the area of focus of selected applications and collaboration.