Web-based collaboration is gaining momentum at many organizations, using Web 2.0 tools such as interactive online meetings, social networks, blogs, twitters, wikis, bookmarks, forums, podcasts, and any other imaginable way of reinventing. People can interact with the Web from the browser on a smartphone or on a desktop. Participants use online collaboration tools like e-mail, chat, discussion forums, Web conferencing, shared whiteboards, and file sharing to promote collaboration. Chat can be either voice- or text-based, point-to-point or in a conference environment. Conferences can be open, where everyone has the ability to speak and interact, or moderated.
People use interactive online meetings to make a sales presentation, demonstrate applications, and review contracts online. People also provide video training or virtual learning in environments such as Second Life for customers, partners, and employees in any location. You are also seeing more frequent use of webinars and online press briefings. It's not limited to meeting activities either. These techniques are also being used to provide IT support for distributed users with remotely controlled desktops, to see and fix the problems in real time.
These diverse forms of collaboration demand different types of participation. Developers use different online collaboration models, each one for a different reason. They choose one or combine some of them to meet the needs of people who want to collaborate online. The two most common models are Pay-As-You-Go Collaboration and Membership-based Collaboration.
In Pay-As-You-Go Collaboration people access services as needed. There is no ongoing membership. You can use the services for one session or many with no contract. Many e-meeting sites have a Pay-As-You-Go approach.
Users like the convenience and utilitarian nature of Pay-As-You-Go. However, this convenience and flexibility often come at a premium. Users who only need a small amount of the service are generally accepting of the cost and look at it more like a car rental or hotel bill.
In Membership-based Collaboration the user forms a longer-term relationship with the service provider, through a subscription or membership. Memberships can be individually negotiated, or as a group, such as an enterprise license. Membership-based users are generally regular users who need the service more often and are willing to commit to a longer-term relationship for increased service or reduced cost.
The choice of model really depends on the nature of the application and the target audience. Most commercial collaboration applications provide both models, with a price break if members subscribe. However, there are also many collaboration applications that don't require any payment by the user, such as Google Calendar and Yahoo Chat.
The experience and requirements for an application will vary depending on the role the user plays in the collaboration. Why is this important? Different roles may favor different environments. For example, some users may be more likely to participate from a smartphone, with a very different set of capabilities from a desktop browser. This difference may change the design of the application, or suggest a different pricing structure for a Pay-As-You-Go user. Here is a brief look at the roles.
In my role as a user, I get an e-mail or calendar invitation on my smartphone to join an online collaboration (for example, a webcast, seminar, or training program) without paying a membership fee. I am on the company's e-mail list as a potential customer for free news alerts on certain product lines and other ways of getting information faster than I would get in a print newsletter.
When I receive an e-mail or calendar invitation on a scheduled seminar or a training program, I press a link to the main Web site to accept or turn down the invitation. If I accept the invitation, I join the seminar or training program. If the mobile version of the Web site does not look nice after I join, I depart from the seminar long before the meeting adjourns.
The impression of how a mobile Web site looks or whether it comes with integrated audio and Web conferencing and active presentation media has a lasting impression on the invitees. I will ask the administrator to remove my name from their list for future seminars or training programs unless I get a notice that a mobile Web site is being redesigned to accommodate a small screen size, small memory size, and other limitations of a smartphone.
As an administrator, I can access utilities, manage collaboration projects, and create user and group accounts. I can allow more than one person or group to access to the same project files. I can store shared files in an environment that each person or group can access to make changes. Some files (particularly music and research papers) may need to be protected with a Creative Commons license that allows you to remix, share, and reuse.
I can arrange for the sales or customer service teams that travel from one place to another to collaborate with the main office from their smartphones. I can permit them to collaborate with the main office and share information in real time. I can permit clients to interact with a product demo and ask questions while they are testing the demo and applications.
I give Supply Chain Management, Plant Engineering Management, and Licensing Physics Research Papers scenarios as examples of the join-to-subscribe models. In all three scenarios, you use a smartphone to attend a scheduled meeting with audio and Web conferencing. You can also view presentations, applications, and desktops with live annotations. Additionally, you can get a participant list and meeting information. You can receive the SMS reminders from a meeting.
When you design an application to take advantage of these features, consider two things: memory on your smartphone and designing for a small screen. Your smartphone should come with ample memory for an online collaboration to launch a mobile Web site. To get more memory, you may need to add storage media to the smartphone. If you find that the maximum memory your smartphone allows is not enough, you may need to upgrade to another smartphone with a larger amount of memory.
No matter how much memory you add to your smartphone, it will always be a fraction of the memory in your desktop computer. On your phone, some desktop Web sites will work properly while others will not. When you design a mobile application or Web site, keep it very simple; forget about the bells and whistles that come with the desktop applications—things that consume a much larger amount of memory.
You can use online collaboration to brainstorm and share ideas or projects interactively with others using Web 2.0 tools. You can invite potential participants internally or externally using e-mail or calendar invitations to join the meeting, and you can keep the meetings as private and secure as you need and see who's coming aboard, talking, blogging, listening, and departing. You can change the private to public mode of online collaboration for a specified period when you want to reach the public to provide comments on an idea or project.
One collaboration tool you could use is, for example, Blueimp's Ajax Chat (see Resources). I have written an article for developerWorks, "Let's chat with Ajax" (see Resources), that describes how you can download and unzip the main chat application file. Ajax Chat integrates with PHP community files.
Before you upload and install the server-side chat files, you need to edit three configuration settings: database, channel, and user. After you upload the files, you will create database tables, and then delete the installation script. You must install MySQL on the server.
Executives, developers, and quality managers meet online on building a mature Software as a Service (SaaS) that plant engineering could use to improve manufacturing cycle times and secure merchandise purchase, sales, and accounting transactions. Executives can use either their smartphones or their desktop computer to share and blog goals, strategies, and tactical project activities with team members—internally or externally. This allows the executives to get feedback in real time and make critical decisions in finance, plant engineering, manufacturing cycle times, supply, and human resources capital planning.
To put an end to frustrating conference calls and circulating e-mails, you can use online meetings that you can integrate with Web 2.0 technologies, such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), JSON, and Flash. Options range from commercial offerings like IBM's Lotus® Connections, which is highly scalable, to free open source solutions such as Dimdim's Open Source Community Edition v4.5 "Liberty," which will share with up to 20 participants. (See Resources for project sites and downloads.)
Physicists, information specialists, and developers meet online to blog on and access Web development projects on innovative ways of reintegrating physics laws and principles into the science of information or another field of science. The topics covered are the usual physics stuff: thermodynamics, quantum effects, and fault-tolerance.
From their smartphones or on their desktop computers, the physicists can protect their research papers with Creative Commons licenses and join interactive online meetings in real time. The team members can organize their work into tasks and put events on an online calendar by project or organization. They can share survey polls and publish news and headlines. They can view who was blogging on what topic and find out who previously accessed documents with Creative Commons licenses.
Tips for mobile application developers
First, do not design a desktop Web site for the small screen size of a smartphone. Again, the memory and CPU power in a mobile device is a fraction of what is available in a desktop computer. The mobile Web site will not run as fast as its desktop cousins.
Handling text on your smartphone's limited keyboard can be a bit cumbersome when entering your data. You slow down to avoid making a mistake. Not all smartphone models can work with a foldable full-size keyboard using bluetooth. As of this writing, no smartphones work with a mouse. They use a trackball to move the cursor and scroll the screen, but it is more like cursor-key functionality rather than a mouse pointer. If your application makes use of mouse-overs and mouse-click functions, then you will need to have alternatives for mobile device users. In many ways, these issues are similar to accessibility issues on a Web site, so you may be able to use similar solutions.
In view of these pointer connectivity and text handling limitations, keep your mobile Web site design simple and easy to use. Use the same content with simple CSS scripts. Make sure you align to the left, and use basic HTML and simple images. While it may seem like an obvious suggestion, be sure to test the Web site on your phone to see how it looks and feels. As an example, take a look at IBM's home page on your desktop and then on your smartphone. They both look very nice, but are designed differently.
Mobile networks sometimes have large network latencies. If your Web site consists of many resource files (for example, images, style sheets, and script files), these latencies can add up and result in poor launch performance. To keep latencies low, consider consolidating some of the resource files, such as merging JavaScript resources into a single file.
Also, every interaction with your Web site requires sending and receiving radio signals, which drains batteries. Keep these to a minimum. Also, be aware of vulnerabilities that might allow attacks on the Web site if it contains mobile widgets and device-resident applications. The mobile device tends to loosen its security policy to allow access to device services such as local e-mail boxes.
Impact of Ipv6 on mobile collaboration
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) will not be able to cope with the growing popularity of smartphones, IPTV, and other gadgets connecting to the Internet. As it will soon run out of address space, it is inevitable that we must migrate to IPv6. Not only does IPv6 provide a much wider range of IP addresses, it provides better integration of PCs, particularly the online collaboration programs, such as supply chain management and plant engineering management, with mobile phones, handheld devices, and other everyday devices.
Both IPv4 and IPv6 provide security for data packets (known as Internet Protocol security or IPSec). They provide file sharing and other online collaboration activities with secured services as the data is moved from one or more sources to one or more destinations on the Internet. They aim to protect the data from being viewed, modified, or hacked while in transit. The difference is that IPSec for IPv4 is a protocol option while IPSec for IPv6 is a protocol requirement.
Companies who take advantage of IPSec for IPv4 being a protocol option, not a requirement, can skip this option and replace it with proprietary protocol security solutions. One drawback is that the prevalence of those solutions created interoperability problems between different IPv4 implementations of Ajax applications. With IPv6 as the protocol requirement, it is possible to achieve interoperability between different IPv6 implementations.
Potential users' demands for real-time interactive online collaboration can be a challenge for developers, business analysts, systems administrators, and other members of a project team. Being aware of, and resolving, the issues of developing Ajax online collaboration Web sites for desktops, smartphones, and other mobile devices can make your team's experiences more successful. Look at the open source projects at SourceForge.net and the various commercial tools available through IBM (see Resources for more information).
Learn
- "Let's chat with Ajax"
(developerWorks, March 2009) describes how you can download and unzip the
main chat application file
- Learn more about collaboration with
Dimdim's
Open Source Community Edition v4.5 "Liberty".
- Learn about
IBM's OpusUna Web-Conferencing Platform
that incorporates widgets, audio, and video cameras.
- Want more information on Ajax tools? Read
about them in
"Survey of Ajax tools and techniques"
(developerWorks, July 2007).
- Read Judith M. Myerson's
The Complete Book of Middleware,
which focuses on the essential principles and priorities of system design
and emphasizes the new requirements brought forward by the rise of
e-commerce and distributed integrated systems.
- Get the business insight and the technical
know-how to ensure successful systems integration by reading
Enterprise Systems Integration, Second Edition.
- Bring your organization into the future
with
RFID in the Supply Chain,
which explains business processes, operational and implementation
problems, risks, vulnerabilities, and security and privacy.
- IBM Redbooks: Read
Tivoli Manager for Domino V2.1 Fulfilling Service Level Agreements Using
Tivoli Technology,
for IBM Lotus Domino administrators, which goes into the nuts and bolts of
developing a service-level agreement.
- Stay current with
developerWorks technical events and webcasts.
Get products and technologies
- Learn more about
Blueimp's
Ajax
Chat
from the project home at SourceForge.net.
- See IBM's
commercial collaboration solutions with
Lotus
Connections.
- See how
IBM
Rational Web Developer for WebSphere Software
for arhictecture management,
IBM Rational ClearQuest
for change and release management, and
IBM Rational Functional Tester Plus
for quality management can help when developing Ajax, DRM, Creative
Commons License and other applications. These tools from IBM help increase
your productivity by reducing testing time and the costs of test labs in
your enterprise
-
IBM trial
products for download:
Build your next development project with IBM trial software, available for
download directly from developerWorks.
Judith M. Myerson is a systems architect and engineer. Her areas of interest include middleware technologies, enterprise-wide systems, database technologies, application development, network management, security, and project management. You can contact her at jmyerson@bellatlantic.net.
Table of contents
Next steps from IBM
WebSphere Application Server can take you to the next step in the evolution of Web Development that lends itself to the creation of rich Web 2.0 user interfaces.
- Try: Download a free trial version of WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, a pre-integrated, lightweight Java 5 application server built on Apache Tomcat and other best-of-breed open source software such as OpenEJB, Apache Axis, and Apache Derby..
- Article: This article introduces you to the web development with WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0. Its a good look at solutions for creating Ajax-based web apps and mashups.
- Tutorial: This tutorial takes you through the PHP and Java steps to master Facebook application Web development with the no-charge WebSphere Application Server Community Edition Web server.
- Demo: This demo showcases the WebSphere Application Server Community Edition administrative console feature set and walks you through deployment of a Web application.
- Buy: WebSphere Application Server - Express
My developerWorks community
Tags
Use the slider bar to see more or fewer tags.
Popular tags shows the top tags for this particular content zone (for example, Java technology, Linux, WebSphere).
My tags shows your tags for this particular content zone (for example, Java technology, Linux, WebSphere).
Popular article tags |
My article tagsSkip to tags list
Popular article tags |
My article tags
