Many research projects have defined applications that are claimed to operate in a MANet environment. Consider for instance these software tools that make it possible to share information (files, data bases, etc.). It appears that most of the proposed solutions require a central server. Such a server makes it possible to store and then distribute a coherent copy of the data to the mobile units of the system, thus providing some sort of data consistency. This approach does not work in a real

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... MANet environment, where the presence of a central server cannot be guaranteed. We believe that the applications that really work in a MANet context are those that do not require global consistency. In this paper we present an application that we have designed and implemented and that makes it possible to share a document among the mobile nodes of a MANet. We furthermore decided to consider MANets without any specific networking layer, and to be more specific MANETs without routing. The major originalities of our solution are that: -it works in a real MANet environment (nodes are really mobile and can be turned on or off at any time); -it makes it possible to modify the shared data without any central server, still ensuring consistency. Of course the price to pay is a number of limitations that we describe.