Rapid engineering of collaborative and adaptive multimedia systems on top of CORBA components

For the development of collaborative multimedia systems two tasks need to be done often. The multimedia connection between distributed systems has to be established and the information about the currently available resources has to be gathered to adapt the application to the environment. We present solutions for these two tasks. The integration of these two solutions became part of a CORBA Component Model (CCM) based middleware and will therefore greatly reduce the development effort of such systems.