TWSAPI: a generic teamwork services application programming interface

One of the problems faced by large, global organizations and enterprises is to effectively enable their employees to collaborate across locations. People need collaborative work support while they are on the move and have to share business documents and know-how. Although much work has been done in the area of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) to date, supporting mobility is only recently receiving attention. Hence, most of the existing approaches do not deal with emerging mobile teamwork requirements such as locating business documents and expertise through distributed searches, advanced subscription and notification, community building, and mobile information sharing and access. Furthermore, existing applications and approaches are usually difficult to customize to business-specific processes and requirements. The Mobile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION) system addresses these requirements and provides a generic teamwork services application programming interface (API), TWSAPI, that can be used to build organization-specific collaborative applications. In this paper we give an overview of the MOTION TWSAPI and illustrate its usage in building an application that provides document review support.