Adaptive Virtual Workspace

Abstract

At Mindware, we are in the forefront of creating cutting edge web communities that are easy to navigate and rich in content. AVW project was to create a robust, scalable online portal/work-space environment, which will bring to life the tools, and frameworks, enabling individuals, organizations and communities to engage, interact and foster communication. Mindware Adaptive Virtual Work-space (AVW) is an integrated web-based solution to meet the common communication/collaboration requirements of an enterprise, or a business organization and automatically triggered by Mindware’s Intelligence Platform.

Solution:

Our AVW (Adaptive Virtual Workspace) solution is made available as a customized deployment on a pre-configured hardware/software platform. It is a service designed to work on a hosted on a web-server.

The end-users will access the AVW services via a web-based interface. The integrated environment of AVW intends to provide the following features:

• Virtual workspace – a virtual office-like environment with a simple and intuitive interface to system-provided assistance in managing applications, documents, people, calendar, mails, tasks, address book, etc. The resources can be shared with other geographically dispersed AVW users and are accessible from anywhere. It is a framework for integrating diverse collaborative capabilities including Audio/Video conferencing.
• Multi-point collaboration – Mindware AVW is a Workspace of collaboration. Users at different locations can collaborate (in an ad-hoc manner) on a documents of different types and one/more user(s) can simultaneously (depending on the Internet connection characteristics) view/modify a document through a shared view.
• Application/desktop sharing – Mindware collaboration capabilities extend further by providing a method for sharing an single-user application (or the desktop itself) with other (multiple) remote users, thereby making joint activities of AVW users from various location a possibility.
• Instant messaging, chat and whiteboard – apart from bringing people and artifacts together, AVW provides extremely useful communication channels – an instant messenger, chat tool, and a shareable whiteboard for drawing/annotation.

Success factors:

• Security
• Ease of use
• Scalable for millions of hits to site
• Providing multiple mediums of communication that will suit the range of needs of users
• Quick response time
• Compliant with existing industry standards

Business Value

• Reduced maintenance cost and increased maintainability, as the data is stored centrally in the server.
• 24×7 access from any web connected PC.
• Efficient communication among groups for electronic turn-ins and feedback.
• Better organization of information resulting in increased productivity.
• Easy to integrate with other enterprise applications.

Technologies used:

AVW was developed using three tier architecture – easily navigable user interface (UI), business logic and data access from database.

• User Interface tier : PHP and JSP pages
• Data Tier Design : MySQL
• Middle Tier Design : Code behind pages coded in C ++, Java/J2EE
• Platform: Linux, Windows