In this paper we present the design and implementation of the VRML97 Distributed Authoring Interface (DAI) introduced in Spin-3D, a distributed Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE). Our proposal is a powerful interface, very close to the classical VRML97 External Authoring Interface (EAI). The DAI allows the connection of any external application with the Spin-3D CVE platform. With the Spin3D CVE platform and the DAI, it will be easy to develop collaborative applications. We use the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to support distributed authoring applications. Complex collaborative applications and remote interaction introduce new considerations in the design of the DAI: we enhance the standard VRML97 EAI with new interfaces in order to easily traverse the VRML97 scene graph and limit the network overhead introduced by the remote interaction. Moreover, taking advantage of the CORBA middleware, external applications can be written with any programming language for which the OMG defined an IDL mapping.