Enabling Lightweight Real-time Collaboration

In the age of digitalization, organizations are globally distributed and need to interact across diverse system landscapes with both their partners and customers. Typically, synchronous collaboration over the Internet requires all participants to meet certain technical prerequisites. In order to interact together in real-time, all participants must download, install, and configure the same software on all client systems.
As a consequence, collaboration has mainly been restricted to organizations that agree to establish a common infrastructure. This might be inadequate and economically not viable in many situations, especially those where actors need to connect quickly. Novel approaches aiming to lower the technical entry barriers to real-time collaboration are explored in this thesis.