As Markus started in mid 1999 to implement the first prototypes on his laptop at night in the office or hotel rooms, he choose as an implementation platform, Microsoft's VI ASP 2.0, because it was the simplest and most easily available tool for him. The prototype was strongly focused on XML - a very new technology at that time, but especially with its strong focus on eXtensibility much better fitting to the unstructured environment of creative collaboration applications. The first prototypes contained the first version of the metalayer "Templates", which still build the fundamentals of the metalayer platform.

In April 2000 a team of ASP software engineers took over and released in June 2000 a product called "metalayer Comty Hub (MCH) 1.0". It provided an infrastructure to set up users and comties, and to create four basic collaboration objects (NEWS, HOTLINK, DISCUSSION and FILE).

In April 2001, MCH 2.0 was released. It was a major shift, as it was not only built on scripted XML, but contained eXtensively XSLT stylesheets to output and present the collaboration object. XSLT 1.0 was just released that time and only Microsoft provided a stable and good performing DOM object supporting XSLT, which worked also in the new browser IE 6 (beta). MCH 2 became over the time of one year a stable platform with many new features - but the performance and the high memory consumption was a major problem, as it was still scripted (Active Server Pages 2.0).

End of 2001 metalayer made the required shift to a compiled environment by moving MCH to Microsoft.NET and C#. But more important than the technology were the functional changes: the introduction of context driven real time collaboration and a dynamic version based on DOM level 1 scripting and the introduction of the shuttle.

DOM LEVEL 1 SCRIPTING

With MCH 3, we introduced two versions on client side: besides the fully static HTML with the add links for adding content, a dynamic version was introduced, fully based on the W3C DOM level 1 open standard. It was a highly client side scripted version. The different objects are placed dynamically in the page and there is a hidden frame which refreshes with a rate of 2 seconds and brings new content for the page, if available.

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THE SHUTTLE

For content creation and submission, we introduced the shuttle - a small box which appears wherever on a page you click with the mouse and which gives you context sensitive tools to create content at a place. The shuttle, so the idea, is like your car, luggage or backpack - its your shuttle to data travel. And it provides you with all kind of tools you need on your journey.

REAL TIME

metalayer started as a asynchronous co-creation and collaboration solution. A collective workplace to generate and exchange content. More and more we realized, that in the long term, there are no asynchronous or real time tools, but it will be tightly integrated within one and the same platform. For the CO-creation and collaboration process, real time and asynchronous working are tightly integrated and happen on the same platform. We introduced with MCH 3 different real time features - not as add-ons, but tightly integrated within the platform.

The refresh every two seconds provided information about the users currently online. For the first time, "you were online, and not alone". Entering to the times page was like entering a company, and you could see, where the different co-workers were within the different comties, what they were working on and you could call them and have a real time interaction, or just answer and work asynchronously in the different areas.

Instead of having different, separated chat rooms, we introduced meeting objects - Meetings are highly context driven, created within the context of a discussion, work document, stream or any collaboration object. And meetings were also context driven at the inside and not linear as chats. A meeting provided just a big space, where messages are posted two dimensional anywhere, as comments to other messages, or on top of the page as new topics.

LETS GO BACK TO THE ORIGINAL VISION - LETS BUILD THE metalayer

The original vision thought metalayer as a layer on top of the data and the application layer, processing meta-information and meta-objects about data sources, applications and users. With focusing on "metalayer Comty Hub", as the first product of metalayer, we strongly focused on the collaboration part of metalayer.

metalayer has decided to broaden scope building the full layer, providing a tightly integrated layer of personalized co-creation and collaboration toolset.

The technology scope has been broadened by providing the platform metalayer 1.0 in both, a Java/Linux as well as a Microsoft.NET environment. Providing two application platform is not a major task, as at least 60% of the application remain unchanged: about 40% of the functions today lies within XSLT, 20% within JavaScript - and the remaining 40% is movable, as C# and Java are similar languages.

The first prototypes of metalayer 1.0 are running and internally used. The first release will be in October, 2002. The core philosophy of metalayer is to use technology to its purpose and not get dictated by it. Technology is used to its maximum benefit and the choice is strictly based upon the need, which is to build the supportive open architecture for collaborative communities and context driven interactions.

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