A communications-enabled collaboration platform: work in progress

Abstract

Existing online collaboration tools and platforms provide basic communications integration and the ability to include some real-time information sources. For enterprise use there are requirements for extending these tools with better integration with existing intelligent communication systems, simplifying the collaboration life cycle, enabling the collaboration process, and being able to support longterm collaborations in a variety of ways. We present a new model for such a collaboration environment called ConnectedSpaces. Like a number of existing systems, ConnectedSpaces uses a collaboration space as the basic construct. We present important feature sets of ConnectedSpaces, including views, spaces as communication endpoints, space persistence and structuring, and a variety of types of embedded objects. We then describe novel features of the ConnectedSpaces framework, including space history, embedded gadgets and robots, semantic processing, and integration with other collaboration frameworks. Finally we illustrate specific ConnectedSpaces functionality with examples from experimental work.