OSS Tools to Support Collaborative Mobile Work Practices

This lecture aims at better understanding the way currently mobile professionals work remotely in collaboration with others both within and beyond the company and matching these current ways of working with the most appropriate open source software (OSS) collaboration tools. This is achieved through addressing the current state of art in the mobility challenges and identifying what is working well or inefficiently in remote collaboration across four case studies. Evidences from the cases show that there is currently a little tool support for mobile work practices and better integration of the tools with companies existing internal systems may improve the productivity of the mobile workers. For researchers, a research lens is proposed to open up discussions and further concepts development with respect to mobile collaboration. For practitioners, a set of technical requirements and a list of corresponding OSS tools are presented to further elaborate the mobile working concept from their own context, with specific focus on the scenario of manager on business trip. The paper concludes in discussing open problems and proposing the research themes within the context of mobile collaboration.