What The COOPerator does not support

Next to describing what The COOPerator does support, it is important to state clearly what is not supported by the prototype. This to avoid confusion later. Of course some of the upcoming points would make very valid extensions to the system, only their implementation has been delayed to some later point in time.

First, the document facility will have roughly the same functionalities as a normal word processor; the only real difference is that more than one person can work on the same document at the same time, albeit not on the same computer screen. But no working methods are supported. Furthermore, there is no such thing as support for programming languages and the like. So if a group would use the tool for a programming project the members could surely check the layout of a programme, but not the syntactic and semantic correctness.

Also, the prototype of is limited in its scope. This implies that it has exactly one goal: make it easier to co-write documents. Students can use the system very well to produce documents and discuss about their work, but if they should start to use it as if it were a true conferencing tool, it would show serious flaws. Finally, neither launching of project groups nor real-time communications will be supported in this version of the tool. The latter of these two is impossible in an asynchronous working environment.