Supporting synchronous collaboration with heterogeneous devices

The increasing availability of mobile devices in today's business contexts raises the demand to shift the focus of groupware framework design. Instead of solely focusing on functional requirements of specific application domains or device characteristics, nonfunctional requirements need to be taken into account as well. Flexibility concerning the integration of devices and tailorability of the framework according to different usage contexts is essential for addressing device heterogeneity. Besides flexibility, in order to support the development of real-world applications involving heterogeneous devices, robustness and scalability concerns have to be addressed explicitly by the framework. This article presents Agilo, a groupware framework for synchronous collaboration. The framework incorporates approaches addressing flexibility, robustness, and scalability issues. The combination of these concerns makes it suitable for development of collaborative applications involving up to hundreds of users. As an example application, a commercial electronic meeting system is presented by illustrating typical usage scenarios, explaining applicationspecific requirements and describing the system design.