Shared Services in Collaborative System Configurations

In network collaborative system, dispersed and co-located users work together to accomplish assigned task in order to achieve their shared goal. While working together, many work related activities are conducted such as interactive communication, sharing resources and manipulating media objects. Furthermore, these activities can happen in many ways either sequential, parallel, synchronous or asynchronous method. Hence, it is crucial to control and coordinate the shared resources, especially during the collaboration process. Currently, various kinds of effective, appropriate and sufficient shared services component used in supporting the collaborative activities. These services are important elements in the successful collaborative environment. However, the implementation involves some technical obstacle such as limited sharing of media objects, complexity in bridging the external sharing applications, lack of flexibility and ease to use sharing platform and neglect the ad-hoc sharing configuration by end-user. Thus, the shared-media are always under-utilized and services component management creates issues of object's access control and conflicts. This paper provides a general abstraction of service components and a comparative study on shared services on several collaborative system frameworks. Results show that existing shared services are not tolerably designed for end-users to design and develop their sharing methods easily. Index Terms— Collaborative System Components, Collaborative System Framework, Media Sharing, Shared Services, Sharing Features, Usability, User Defined, Workspace. ——————————  ——————————