Hermes: On collaboration across heterogeneous collaborative editing services in the cloud

With the prevalence of cloud services, more and more editing tools are moving from client to cloud for collaboration. Google Docs, Microsoft Office Web Apps, Zoho Office Suite are such representative cloud backed co-editing services. People from different organizations may choose different service providers, which implies the needs of cross-cloud document collaboration. However, it is hard to make different collaborative editing services interoperate with each other. On the one hand, it is not realistic to let all service providers comply to a unified standard and provide interoperation interfaces. On the other hand, the challenge of consistency maintenance in real-time document synchronization still exists. These make interoperability one of the most significant collaboration barriers in online collaborative editing. This paper presents a transparent approach called Hermes to interoperating between heterogeneous collaborative editing services in the cloud. Users are allowed to use their familiar services to participate in the cross-cloud document collaboration. Service providers do not need to put any effort to interoperate with other services. Our approach is validated by a system prototype.