Coordination in Android Mobile Teams

Abstract

With the ever increasing number of mobile devices and their computational capacity in terms of processing, storage and software, the use of smart devices is being employed each time more not only for basic use and entertainment and social networking but also for work. Besides this added value to use smart devices for work at individual level, the interest is of course to explore the use of such devices at teamwork level to enable collaboration of workforce both geographically distributed and on the move. Indeed, endowing teams of people that are geographically distributed to work together is very important nowadays in many fields such as field work, journalism, online collaborative learning, disaster management scenarios, businesses-especially Small and Medium size Enterprises-etc. Unlike web-based applications, there are many issues and challenges in mobile setting such as coordination, synchronization, awareness services, etc. In this paper, we propose an application that support members of a group using their mobile devices (under Android system) to coordinate and develop together a common project. The application is based on a super-peer architecture, with a super peer implemented at Sugar CRM server and members of the group as peers.