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DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF SECURE WEB BASED COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1   Background of the Study

Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) allows participant from distant geographic location to share a common virtual environment, including virtual entities and resources maintained by a group of computers. In such a way that it can support effective communication among the users to achieve synergistic coordination of tasks [1-3]. Applications of CVEs include Education, massively multiplayer online games (e.g., World of Warcraft), virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life), military training, industrial remote training, and collaborative engineering [4-7]. As the number of concurrent participants is becoming larger, the CVE systems may no longer provide the level of consistency and scalability required, typically in terms of response time [1, 7, 8]. [1] proposes a dynamic clustering algorithm for partitioning the virtual environment with variable number of region servers. The algorithm calculates the most reasonable number of regions by tracking the number of users in the system. At the initial state of the system, one region server manages all cells in the different world. When the main server that monitors the load of the system periodically find the server approaching its capacity limit, the dynamic clustering algorithm is executed to partition the virtual environment, whereas another program is busy configuring a new server to handle excess load.

Each time this algorithm is partitioning the virtual environment, other program must be configuring new server to handle the new partition, executing another process for merging different regions to or executing steps for the region server to exit from the system and merge it cells to another region. This process may take much time to execute and consume a lot of computing and communication resources. With current issues of increasing simultaneous number of users in CVE, this is not really suitable for time dependent applications such as CVE. The new region server consumes much time as well as communication resources. This is because the amount of data required to be transferred from a particular region server to a new region server are voluminous.

According to Forrester [9] end user organizations will continue to show strong interest in email and IM/presence services. This segment accounts for close to 14% of the total collaboration services market in 2011. Forrester estimates that the segment will grow by 10.6% through 2018, as organizations continue to migrate email systems from onpremises, self-managed models to host and cloud-based models. Therefore, we propose the design of a cloud based CVE to improve its effeteness. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section II describes an overview of CC. Section III presents the description of the major benefits of CC. Section IV covers a brief explanation on CC architecture. Section V presents the propose a framework and potential benefits in Section VI before concluding remarks in Section VII.

1.1     Background to Study

The development of information and communication technology (ICT) is changing the way in which people work, communicate and learn. Co- operative and collaborative environments will allow group work, group conferences or joint effort in knowledge building. Nevertheless, technological possibilities, instead of pedagogical principles often lead the development of virtual learning environments (Rubens, 2003). This has led to disappointing results in the past. Recently pedagogical principles are leading in the development of virtual learning environments. According to Simons (2003), the time is finally ripe for "digital pedagogy". In the ITCOLE-project pedagogical principles were the fundaments of the development of web-based Collaborative Learning Environments (CLEs). One of the main challenges in the ITCOLE-project was the design and development of collaborative software systems that maintain the (synchronous/asynchronous) collaboration and that can be integrated in a web- educational environment. This article describes these pedagogical principles. Furthermore, it introduces the software developed and it presents the evaluation results of the software.

1.2     Statement of Problem

For the past decays,  ITCOLE has been working on a different platform but sharing of files among users manually, were by each staff can work his own part and module, then letter it will be integrated to each other. They could not collaborate on a specific work because there was no means for it to be possible as of the time. After some years back, the company had their first collaborative project work I, which was more better than the conventional means in operation before then, but the system was still lacking in some ways as it completely lock when a single user is working on the current file. This was also a set back to the company. Therefore, the research came up with his proposal to develop a secured and reliable collaborative system where many uses can be using the system and working on a single file at once without locking the file for one user.

1.3     Objective of the Study

The researcher will be accomplishing the following objectives in this research work. Which are:

1. A secure and reliable collaborative environment for work and learning.

2. A web based system that can communicate with all its uses and notify them on the current work and changes done on the work that are attached to.

3. A system that will keep track of each user activities on the site and monitor what they do.

4. Add an auto save functionality to the system so that as soon as a user stop working it will automatically save the last operation he or she has done without waiting for the user to save his current changes.

1.4     Significance of the study

This research work is unique in terms of its auto save functionality. Also, this system will help the company ITCOLE to work on her project from any part of the world without moving with his office system or laptop, all you need is to verify yourself as an authorized user and have your access to work from where you stop and see what others have added to the work. This system saves memory space allows sharing of ideals and knowledge.

1.5     Scope of the study

This research work will be covering the ITCOLE company Lagos and there work activities. This work is only for web so, it is a web based application and can only run a web enable device.

1.6     Limitation of the study

According to Best and Khan (1993) limitations are conditions beyond the ability of the researcher that may place restriction on the conclusions of the study and their application to other situations. The first limitation is on the part of the application, the system only use pin code authentication means to verify users, which on the proposed system a biometric means is more secure. The other limitation was on the part of the researcher to carry out the research design effectively and source for materials and assistance.

1.7     Definition of terms

Collaboration: is the process of two or more people or organizations working together to realize shared goals

Virtual Environment: A Virtual Environment is a tool to keep the dependencies required by different projects in separate places, by creating virtual Python environments for them.

Webbased Application: In computing, a web application or web app is a client–server software application which the client (or user interface) runs in a web browser.

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