As successful SMEs extend their reach and scope in a globalising world, they face the challenge of maintaining agility, creativity and decision speed that is their key competitive strength: Key personnel like managers or specialists are increasingly on business trips and thus not available for problem solving or decision making. Paradoxically, this problem of remote collaboration is further exacerbated by the growing use of more enterprise and productivity applications by SMEs such as CAx, PDM, ERP, etc. These systems and their data is usually not available remotely and thus people "on the road" do not have the basis for meaningful collaboration and decision making, introducing delays, quality problems and lost opportunities.

The objective of CoVES is to develop a flexible collaboration environment including access to rich data and applications for nomadic professionals and partners targeted towards SMEs. To this end the project will define new working models and functionalities for effective (mobile) collaboration, develop a flexible open service integration architecture that allows wrapping of enterprise applications and integration of collaboration services, develop a user centric client concept especially for mobile devices, implement a pilot system geared towards the engineering domain through a user driven development methodology, and align with and extend existing standardisation initiatives in the mobile application domain.

Appropriate for the innovations targeted, the project combines in its 30 month workplan a system design methodology for architectural components with an iterative, user-driven living lab approach for the collaboration functionality and environment design.

Related to the target market, the consortium itself combines innovative technology provider SMEs and representative user SMEs with the expertise of leading research institutions at the cross-road of mobile applications, collaboration systems and enterprise applications.