Oh, no! Not Another Web-based Desktop!

Among the advantages of cloud services, the most important are ubiquitous availability and collaboration support. Are the current technological solutions up to the job, in order to face the challenges posed by these two features? To provide an answer, the paper surveys some examples of online collaboration applications and concludes that what is still missing is an environment that acts as a “glue” with respect to all user online activities. We present TablesPlusPlus (T++), an online meta-environment handling thematic and collaborative contexts as tables. The user sits at to organize and perform her activities, thanks to an effective support to user collaboration. The paper discusses the characteristics of T++ and describes its architecture, together with our proof-of-concept prototype. T++ represents the missing environment, acting as a “glue” with respect to heterogeneous collaborative user activities.