Collaborative virtual engineering for SMEs: Solutions for nomadic engineers and managers

Real-time interactive collaboration is the key to the success of organisations providing customised products/services to clients. This is especially the case when managers and engineers are on the move and need to communicate with and access data from not only the head office, but from other partners and clients engaged in the definition, development, delivery, or maintenance of the product/service. This paper presents technical developments of a collaborative environment built using mashup concepts to support SMEs in their virtual engineering work for three main use cases: manager on business trip; engineer on remote site; virtual team collaboration. An iterative living lab approach constituting systemic consideration of people, processes, and technologies was used. Findings indicate that for SMEs, simple integration of applications and services using mashup is a cheaper and more viable alternative for their collaborative virtual engineering work as compared to heavy investments in integration of applications using approaches such as service oriented architectures.