The design of collaboration-aware applications is still a topic of discussion. Heterogeneity in various aspects, such as operating systems, networks, window systems, and user applications, is a fact that must be dealt with and cannot be neglected by modern groupware toolkits. We want to show that the so-called software bus provided by CORBA serves as an appropriate middleware for synchronous CSCW applications. The TOBACO project presented uses a CORBA-based CSCW service to implement a collaboration-aware CAD system. This enables us to achieve inter-operability among operation systems and even with commercial CAD systems integrated by a wrapper approach.
