A cooperative platform called Cova is presented, which aims to uniformly model a wide range of cooperation scenarios and to reduce the groupware design and development work. To achieve these goals, Cova provides two facilities, namely a specification language for developers to describe various cooperation modes uniformly and a run-time system that provides some generalpurposed services guaranteeing the semantics specified. With these facilities, the developers can then concentrate on the application specific functions rather than the control mechanisms. Therefore, the development efficiency is promoted. This paper details the design and implementation issues of the platform including the model and the specification language, platform architecture, transaction management, service integration and so on. Application development with Cova platform is also covered.