A service architecture for mobile teamwork

Abstract

Mobile teamwork has become an emerging requirement in the daily business of large enterprises. Employees collaborate across locations and need support while they are on the move. Business documents (artifacts) and expertise need to be shared independent of the actual location or connectivity (e.g., access through a mobile phone, laptop, Personal Digital Assistant, etc.) of employees. Although many collaboration tools and systems exist, most do not deal with new requirements such as locating artifacts and experts through distributed searches, advanced information subscription and notification, and mobile information sharing and access. The MOTION service architecture that we have developed supports mobile teamwork by taking into account the different connectivity modes of users, provides access support for various devices such as laptop computers and mobile phones, and uses XML meta-data and the XML Query Language (XQL) for distributed searches and subscriptions. In this paper, we describe the architecture and the components of our generic MOTION service platform for building collaborative applications. The MOTION Teamwork Services Components are currently being evaluated in two industry case-studies.