The Habanero environment provides the necessary environment to create collaborative work environments and virtual communities. The environment includes a server that hosts sessions and a client that interacts with sessions using a variety applications called Hablets. Sessions can be recorded, persistent, access restricted and can even be anonymous. The Habanero client provides the interface to define, list, create, join and interact with a session. The client provides session information, user identification, a notification mechanism, record and replay capabilities, security, a list of active users and tools, an address book and the capability to easily create session definitions. The client has two user interfaces: one is used to pre-define sessions off-line and the other is used to interact with active sessions on-line in realtime. The Habanero client is capable of interacting between multiple sessions, each with multiple tools and it can be defined as a helper application for a web browser giving it the capability to join sessions and replay recorded sessions from a web page.