Supporting Collaboration in Mobile-Aware Groupware

This paper builds on the experiences gained from the extensive work carried out during the MOST project, which investigated the use of mobile technologies to support multimedia collaboration between highly mobile field engineers in the safety critical domain of the U.K. power distribution industry.

Abstract

This paper builds on the experiences gained from the extensive work carried out during the MOST project [MOST,95]. This project investigated the use of mobile technologies to support multimedia collaboration between highly mobile field engineers in the safety critical domain of the U.K. power distribution industry. The MOST team developed a prototype distributed groupware application which was arguably the first collaborative mobile application ever built that was capable of adaption in a mobile environment [Cheverst,94]. The application was designed as an expandable toolkit comprising a number of modules including a shared GIS module. This module enabled groups of field engineers to perform spatially-aware collaboration by supporting the display and annotation of network schematics across groups. The MOST application was evaluated by real end-users in a trial scenario using the GSM service for communications. This evaluation provided a valuable set of implications regarding the development of distributed groupware in conjunction with mobile technologies. The main argument of this paper concerns the need for a new type of awareness, i.e. mobileawareness, that provides group members with relevant information concerning the effect that the