Web services for groupware in distributed and mobile collaboration

While some years ago the focus of many Groupware systems has been the support of "Web computing", i.e. to support access with Web browsers, the focus today is shifting towards a programmatic access to "software services", regardless of their location and the application used to manipulate those services. Whereas the goal of "Web Computing" has been to support group work on the Web (browser), Web services support for Groupware has the goal to provide interoperability between many groupware systems. The contribution of this paper is threefold: (i) to present a framework consisting of three levels of Web services for Groupware support, (ii) to present a novel Web services management and configuration architecture with the aim of integrating various Groupware systems in one overall configurable architecture, and (iii) to provide a use case scenario and preliminary proof-of-concept implementation example. Our overall goal for this paper is to provide a sound and flexible architecture for gluing together various Groupware systems using Web services technologies.