SPIKE1 – A Collaboration Platform for Short-Term Virtual Business Alliances

More and more companies are realising that business is best carried out in project-based virtual alliances and are intensively networking and collaborating with partner companies. This requires convergent, adaptive, and interoperable IT environments ready to support flexible, loosely coupled networked enterprises, anywhere, anytime regardless of heterogeneous systems and applications in use. This paper presents the basic idea and vision as well as the major technical building blocks of the SPIKE collaboration platform. The solution encompasses a semantically enriched service oriented infrastructure employing an enterprise service bus. At the user interface level, we follow a collaborative process portal approach, capturing the user’s working context and seamlessly transmitting it to other applications and services according to the current workflow. Special focus lies on the security issues involved including a federated identity management (IdM) infrastructure, guaranteeing secure and coordinated interactions between and across