The transparent adaptation approach to the development of awareness mechanisms for groupware

Implementing support for group awareness is an essential and challenging process in groupware development. This paper reports our research on developing a Transparent Adaptation (TA) approach, which is used to develop awareness mechanisms for groupware. The TA approach is distinctive because the implementation of awareness mechanisms is separate from that of groupware (groupware transparency), and components developed in this approach can be reused in building different awareness mechanisms (software reuse,), In this paper, we describe our software architecture for the TA approach, and four software layers of awareness mechanisms. We have applied the TA approach in implementing awareness mechanisms for collaborative word processing (Co Word) and instant messaging (MSN Messenger).