Architectural concerns in distributed and mobile collaborative systems

Organizations increasingly coordinate their product and service development processes to deliver their products and services as fast as possible, and to involve employees, customers, suppliers, and business partners seamlessly in different stages of the processes. These processes have to consider that their participants are increasingly on the move or distributed while they are working. Expertise needs to be shared across locations and different mobile devices. This paper describes a framework for distributed and mobile collaboration, defines a set of requirements for virtual communities, and discusses a mobile teamwork support software architecture that has been developed in the EU-project MOTION. The framework together with the architecture enables to enhance current collaboration approaches to include the dimension of mobile participants and virtual communities for distributed product development. This is achieved by integrating process and workspace management requirements with Peer-to-Peer Middleware, Publish-Subscribe, and Community and User Management components. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.