The main approach for the development of groupware applications presented in the literature, has been the use of toolkits. However, at least in the case of groupware applications the main advantages of toolkits have not been fully accomplished. They don’t offer the necessary flexibility to address the social aspects related to the interaction of geographically dispersed groups. Although the web is the main application environment for current applications, only recent toolkits have been able to support the groupware development for the web. In this paper, we discuss and describe the work carried out in converting COPSE to COPSE-Web, an infrastructure for the development of web-based groupware applications. We used this work to discuss the requirements, the architectural and implementation issues in the design of an integrated groupware toolkit. We illustrate the advantages of our approach by describing the development of the environment’s administration tool.