Towards a Standards-based Message-oriented Advanced Collaboration System

The active use of Access Grid systems by many scientific and engineering communities over several years has uncovered a number of architectural and usability problems of this technology. After examining the system architecture of the current Access Grid and the recent trend in the instant messaging systems, we devised an alternative advanced collaboration system using an established standard protocol. According to our approach, the Access Grid is seen as a set of functions and services rather than a defined system architecture. We used the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol to implement Access Grid functionality with a much simpler architecture. This system allows us to easily extend its capability using the plug-in mechanism. Furthermore, it allows developers to design various different client applications with appropriate user interfaces. These features are significantly important for supporting a wide range of communities with different requirements.