Service-oriented architecture for mobile collaboration

Abstract

In a business environment, effective communication is crucial for the employee's productivity and creativity. In this paper, we propose a SOA-based Collaboration Framework for mobile collaboration applications. This framework aims at promoting the business communication to a new level by means of architectural flexibility, lightweight design approach and a substantially increased availability of cooperation support. As part of our approach, we are working on core collaborative Web Services proposed by the Ecospace project [6]. The more complex composite Web Services can be implemented by combining the core Web Services into interaction scenarios using BPEL [17] workflow. The client part of the Mobile Collaboration Framework can run on almost any mobile device including regular cell phones and smart phones. We investigate different approaches to building composite collaboration scenarios using workflow engine running on the middleware as well as on the client. Finally, we provide an example for our framework and show how a complex scenario can be implemented using core and composite Web Services.