A collaborative engine for enterprise application integration

Most companies in tooling industry position themselves as partners of large companies and operate in a made-to-order fashion. As the product lifecycle is becoming short, the time for tooling companies to design and produce tools shrinks remarkably. To survive in such a competitive market, many tooling companies are seeking solutions to shorten their entire business cycle by improving their working efficiency and productivity with effective collaboration. This paper presents a collaborative engine, capable of supporting horizontal and vertical integration by providing a computer-supported collaborative environment. The engine has been modeled and designed as a foundation for the development of collaborative environments for tooling companies to improve business performance by enhancing internal collaboration, maximizing information sharing and reuse, and seamlessly linking business activities. A collaborative design environment has been prototyped to demonstrate the efficiency of the engine. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.