A Cloud-Based Environment for Collaborative Resources Management

The interaction between users and digital devices has deeply changed in the last decades. In particular, the so called desktop metaphor relied on assumptions which have been modified by the rise of new paradigms, such as Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. This paper discusses the limits of the desktop metaphor and proposes a new interaction model, TablePlusPlus (T++), aimed at providing Web and Cloud users with interaction mechanisms fulfilling their needs, i.e., the possibility of handling activity contexts, collaborating with other users, and homogeneously managing heterogeneous objects. T++ tables provide a context-based environment which enables a homogeneous treatment of heterogeneous content items, enhanced by a table-level annotation mechanism supporting an abstract view over resources, which is missing in standard current desktop and collaborative environments. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, this work developed a prototype and tested it in two controlled experiments, whose results are definitely encouraging.