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Motivated by the need to support concurrent, collaborative access to shared documents, we have designed and validated an architecture that integrates existing and familiar systems for client editing software and document repositories. Through Web-services, we achieve an open system wherein numerous clients can use varied editing tools to fit their preferences and access documents distributed on a heterogeneous collection of document repository systems (configuration management systems, or CMS). Our simulation results on numerous client/server configurations validate our architecture and demonstrate an increase in concurrent access to shared documents; by adding a Lock Manager to the server, our system achieves a 67% reduction in check-out failures. Additionally, we present a novel algorithm that avoids operational transformation (OT) by utilizing a dynamic, hierarchical locking scheme that is transparent to the user. This algorithm maximizes concurrent access and enables edit caching to minimize communication costs.