Crosspoint: a WEb-based Collaboration System

Abstract

Modern collaboration systems offer users an un- precedented number of ways to communicate but have a critical flaw: they assume users already know with whom they should collaborate. Crosspoint addresses this shortcoming by recommending collaborators and by facilitating collaboration (i.e., setting up collabora- tion sessions). In this paper, we examine successful so- cial networking sites to identify the plethora of features that users have come to expect from a web-based collab- orative environment. We present the design and archi- tecture of Crosspoint and show how it enables expert- finding via a novel search engine that targets the un- derlying data repository, a relational database. Once a group of experts is identified, Crosspoint facilitates col- laboration by hooking into the lightweight (i.e., web) clients provided by third-party collaboration suites.