Integration of Cloud Services for Web Collaboration: a User-Centered Perspective

The ubiquitous and pervasive availability of the Internet, and of Web-based services, is dramatically changing our lives. Meanwhile, our presence on the Web is growing fast, being enabled by the large offer of low-cost devices and wireless broad-band internet connections. On the other hand, we are adopting on-line applications and services more and more, both for personal and business purposes, in order to get in touch with other people and to manage documents, pictures, and many other types of artifacts in a ubiquitous environment which does not impose the usage of a specific end-user device. The naturally arising question is thus the following: if our projects, activities, collaboration teams are developed around us, why do we have to deal with large numbers of separate services, each one operating in a separate representation of our reality, instead of performing our tasks in a unified environment integrating such different services for us? This chapter discusses this aspect of nowadays user collaboration and presents an infrastructure for the development of user-centered clouds of services which enable the user to interact with her favorite applications from a unified environment managing her workspaces and collaborations. The management of such collaborative service clouds is enabled by an open architecture, that provides services and data synchronization, coupled with a set of core applications supporting essential aspects of the functionality of the environment, such as workspace awareness, user groups definition and user cooperation to the management of shared tasks involving the usage of heterogeneous services.