Architectural Trade-Offs for Collaboration Services Supporting Contextual Collaboration

Contextual collaboration services seamlessly integrate existing groupware technologies into a single consistent interaction model. This model is usually implemented by a contextual collaboration infrastructure that needs to efficiently cope with the fast switching between different modes of interaction. This paper introduces a new model for contextual collaboration based on the notion of generic shared objects. We describe a native implementation of this model and evaluate its behavior under different traffic conditions. We also explore an alternative implementation of the collaboration model integrating existing notification and meeting servers to deliver the same model behavior. We discuss trade-offs and limitations of those two implementations.