CoEd -- A Tool for Cooperative Development of Hierarchical Documents

: In this paper we report on our experiences from developing and using a tool to provide optimal support during cooperative development of hierarchical documents. The main problems in cooperative work is to maintain an overview of how the document is evolving, and at the same time to maintain a complete version history. We extend traditional version control in the sense that we provide version control on both the entire structure of the document and its constituent parts. This enables us to establish natural baselines of the document which have actually existed, and furthermore our system is capable of manipulating directly the structure of the document while retaining complete version history. CoEd consists of four browsers which shows the configuration, version, hierarchy and text aspects of the document. We describe the analysis and considerations which led us to the actual design and implementation of the two prototypes of CoEd. Furthermore, we detail the experiences we have gaine..