Enabling Cross Enterprise Collaboration with IVIP

The increasing need for cross enterprise communication for engineering teams can not be fulfilled by a single tool. The collaboration must at least be supported by two complementary concepts: Sharing resources (data and services) on the one hand and explicit tools for communication and coordination on the other hand. This paper presents results from iViP project. On top of CORBA, the vertical market services of the OMG and the iViP framework, we specified several services to explicitly enable cross enterprise collaboration in heterogeneous environments. After presenting the overall approach, this paper focuses on two important branches: The iViP-Conference service as a bracket to arbitrary synchronous collaboration tools and iViP-Software on Demand, an enabling service for accessing iViP services at remote sites. Some remarks on the general security concepts of iViP and additional experiences on using CORBA in this application stress the practical perspective of this paper.