9313857 Abdel-Wahab Traditionally the Internet has been used for asynchronous collaboration mostly using email, remote login and file transfer. Recently we have seen the emergence of computer conferencing as a new Internet application to allow synchronous collaboration among geographically diverse users working together as a team on common projects. A process that once would have taken days, with documents being sent back and forth between users, now can be completed in a few minutes which increases the productivity and helps in making decisions quicker. At this time there is no standard protocol and mechanism that allows computer conferences to register and advertise about themselves. Therefore users have to depend on personal communications and other indirect methods to find out and locate ongoing conferences so that they can join and participate. In this project a system called Universal Conference Information Server (UCIS) will be designed and implemented to solve this problem. This implementation of UCIS will stimulate further research in this area and can be used as a basis for defining and ultimately the adoption of a standard Internet protocol for computer-based conferencing. The system has three major components: Announcers, Servers, and Queriers. Announcers send conference information to Servers, while Queriers retrieve conference information stored at the Servers. Like most Internet service, UCIS will offer its services in both TCP and UDP forms. We will define the necessary protocols used by all three components and provide sample implementation which can be used as a model by computer conference system builders. The system is designed to be scalable to handle the expected growth in this form of synchronous collaboration and to provide reliable, accurate, and fast access to any number of users anywhere in the Internet. ***
