Algebraic High-Level (AHL) nets are defined as integration of Petri nets with algebraic data types, which allows to model the communication structure and the dataflow within one modelling framework. Transformations of AHL-nets -- inspired by the theory of graph transformations -- allow in addition to modify the communication structure. More- over, high-level processes of AHL-nets capture the concurrent semantics of AHL-nets in an adequate way. Altogether we obtain a powerful integrated formal specification technique to model and analyse all kinds of communication based systes. In this paper, we give a comprehensive introduction of this framework -- including main results concerning parallel independence of AHL-transformations and amalgamation of processes -- and show how this can be applied to model and analyse modern communication and collaboration platforms like Google Wave and Wikis. Especially we show how the Local Church-Rosser theorem for AHL-net transformations can be applied to ensure the consistent integration of different platform evolutions. Moreover the amalgamation theorem for AHL-processes shows under which conditions we can amalgamate waves of different Google Wave platforms in a compositional way.