Portable enterprise collaboration contexts

Abstract

Typical collaborations are composed of multiple interactions between people, who may participate from different geographical locations, and may use different devices, modalities and services. For mobile enterprise users, the availability of complete collaboration context, i.e. collaboration information with correlation between artifacts (data and services), at all times, whether they are online or offline, is essential for real-time response to business needs. Available collaboration solutions do not allow complete automatic creation of such contexts. In addition, solutions that support offline access to such context use a local replica of the server on the client, which is cumbersome and is not feasible for all types of mobile devices. The paper proposes a light-weight, portable format for representing collaboration contexts, and enabling offline access to them using disparate devices, without using any local server. It also proposes a conceptual system that uses information, represented in this format, to activate collaborations from any device