*Thing: Improve Anything to Anything Collaboration

Abstract

This is a work in the context of Collaborative Working Environment (CWE). In particular, in that of collaboration and productivity software tools. CWEs have seen the adoption of application software to addresses business problems as team communication and workload management. Instant messaging solutions, mobile devices and the virtual assistant paradigm have also come into the picture. Software tools in this context lack nonetheless real collaborative features. The problem that we address in this work is therefore that of a truly collaborating team collaboration and productivity software environment. Our approach leverages recent trends, like that of instant chats, virtual assistants and the Internet of Things, focuses on team members utterances and on a customizable and configurable bot framework to automate routine tasks, provide content over structure information management, and enable workflow management to improve productivity. The result is a prototypical software product which: enables the collaboration of both humans and Internet enabled things alike, provides easy context driven collaboration (i.e. entities graphs), allows the systematic processing of messages exchanged in a concurrent multi-user environment to fulfill team actions, provides a middle layer bot framework that handles the dialog flow for these actions and the interaction with any external systems. All of which distinguishes it from current software solutions. Given the features and the architecture of our original software components, we can confidently state that their adoption would enable software developers to create more effective collaboration and productivity working environment software tools.