MP-Collaborator: a mobile collaboration tool in pervasive environment

“Copyright © [2009] IEEE. Reprinted from 5th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications. WIMOB 2009. ISBN: 978-0-7695-3841-9 . This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.”In modern organizations, the communication between collaborators is essential to improve productivity. There is a need for mobile collaboration tools that allow efficient collaboration among staff in organization which may be located in different geographical areas and time zones. Mobile and pervasive computing provides easy and convenient access to information, enabling effective collaboration. This paper describes a context and location-aware mobile application, called MP-Collaborator, created to improve and optimize the communication between collaborators in any organization. MP- Collaborator draws information from location, user status and Pocket Outlook Calendar to create a user availability profile, which is published to any other user in the network. Based on availability status, the user can be reached using a simple phone call or a message. Through the opportunistic use of available mobile technologies MP-Collaborator provides a simple but critical service - user presence service. The proposed solution is validated both in terms of features and communication through a series of experiments on real devices through Wi-Fi network