Mobile Support for Collaborative Work

Abstract

Abstract. An attempt is made to characterize situations in which the use of mobile devices can be useful for the development of collaborative systems. Mobile devices have advantages, such as small size, low cost, portability. They also have disadvantages, such as small viewing screen, little storage capacity, slow processor, unreliable communication facilities. The idea is to use them when advantages are most relevant and disadvantages do not affect the system under development. A collaborative system for text co-authoring is presented as an example of design for the best conditions of mobile devices inclusion. This system uses the mobile devices for individual tasks performed while away from normal work site in uncomfortable or congested places.

Selecting Computing Devices to Support Mobile Collaboration

“…Like storage and memory requirements, the processing power needed for certain mobile applications can exceed what handheld devices can currently offer (Kortuem et al 2001;Guerrero et al 2004). However, in case of PDAs, it is possible to find commercial devices with CPU speeds higher than 500 Mhz.…”

“…Many researchers have identified this issue as critical to support mobile collaboration (Kortuem et al 2001;Guerrero et al 2004). However, the use of context-information provides a way to optimize the use of power supply resulting in a longer lasting battery life (Chen and Kotz 2000;Häkkilä and Mäntyjärvi 2005).…”

“…Applications with large visual representations require large screens such as notebooks' screens. Although handheld devices have been criticized in the literature by their small screens (Guerrero et al 2004;Kortuem et al 2001), recent visualization techniques have improved the capabilities of these devices to display graphical/detailed information (Baudisch et al 2004).…”

“…Typically PDAs and mobile phones are useful to support simple interventions (such as checking email and reading/sending short messages) and notebooks and tablet PCs are appropriate for medium-complex interventions (e.g. text authoring) (Guerrero et al 2004). …”

CoFra: Towards structurally selecting ICT tools and methods in multidisciplinary distributed projects

“…Everyday people use their mobile, hand held devices to coordinate their collaboration with one another [4]. Guerrero et al [12] agree that mobile support is essential for collaboration tools. Mobile devices are low cost, small size, and most of all provide portability.…”