MITRE Releases Open Source Collaborative Software

                          The MITRE Corporation's
                      Collaborative Virtual Workspace

                            Open Source Release

The MITRE Corporation is pleased to announce the public availability of its
Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) software.

CVW is a virtual environment that supports geographically disparate groups,
allowing teams to communicate, collaborate, and share information using
synchronous tools. CVW enables virtual co-location via persistent "rooms"
incorporating people, information, and tools appropriate to a task,
operation, or service.

To the user, CVW is presented through a building metaphor, connecting floors
and rooms where each room provides a context for communication and document
sharing. Upon entering a room, users receive automatic session management
for textual chat, audio/video conferencing, document storage and retrieval,
and shared whiteboards. When users leave the room or disconnect, the
persistent state of that room's documents and whiteboards is preserved.

>> About the Software

CVW employs the LambdaMOO server and a custom Document server to manage its
back-end persistent state, and offers a choice of three front-end clients
for users:

  - A Tk client (traditionally run on UNIX platforms)
  - A Java client (traditionally run on Windows platforms)
  - A Palm client (for Palm OS hand-held devices)

A whiteboard implementation is included with the Tk and Java clients. The
clients are designed to interface with other external tools including a web
browser, multicast video and audio (vic/vat), and a configurable set of
document viewing/editing programs.

>> About MITRE

MITRE is a nonprofit systems engineering firm engaged in scientific and
technical activities for the public interest. CVW is a product of a
collaboration technology research initiative sponsored by the MITRE
Technology Program. MITRE does not and cannot (by agreement with our
sponsors) manufacture or sell products. MITRE is pleased to offer CVW as an
Open Source project to anyone who wishes to experiment with and use
collaboration technologies.

MITRE will help moderate software integration, review code contributions,
and publish new versions of the core code base. We hope others will
contribute to this project and find CVW useful as they work with
collaboration technologies and concepts. We hope the CVW Open Source project
makes the power of synchronous computer mediated collaboration available,
supportable and affordable to many fields of use outside those of MITRE's
sponsors.

>> Availability

The CVW software, documentation, licensing terms, developer and other
information can be found on the CVW web site:

                           http://cvw.mitre.org/

We are pleased to make CVW available to the community, and we look forward
to receiving your feedback and participation!

>> Contacts

The CVW Team <info@cvw.mitre.org>
The MITRE Corporation <http://www.mitre.org/>