Description: Real-time Collaboration focuses on different users (both internals and externals) who have to work in parallel
on the same document with the benefit of saving time, with the ability to merge of different document versions as well as
save synchronization. A process for user provisioning over the whole life cycle is needed to meet the requirement that a user is granted
access permission to specific files or folders.
Assumptions: It is assumed that shared information will be confidential and so the communication channel and the
storage place should therefore be encrypted. There is also a high technical requirement to the availability to the document which is
the working target of the real-time collaboration on documents. An other aspect is capacity of the available storage, it has to be
assumed that documents are growing during the period of collaboration till the document becomes the final status.
Audit trails have to be available. Simple process for user provisioning available.
Typical challenges: Real-time Collaboration on business documents is not an ad-hoc solution; there are permanent user
accounts in conjunction with access to dedicated storage place. The challenge will be the user provisioning, to ensure that a user account
is bounded to a contract or agreement and will be maintained according to the user life cycle process.
Indications: Internal and external partners must share documents and work at the same time such as collaboration on
business documents such as project map, strategy plan. Other pointers:
Browser based interface; Business is information owner and takes decision who gets access to which information; Strong two factor
authentication by using MTAN, or token (i.e. OTP, certificates).
Contra-indications: Unable to distribute tokens.
Resistance against threats:The residual risk that will always stay is regarding the unmanaged Client of the external partner
(data leakage). This risk varies depending whether it is a client of a trusted company or a client of a private person.
The following threats should be considered:
Files can be stored by external users which are containing malicious code
User gets to much permission or wrong folder access
Versioning conflict if to many users working on the document during the same time
References: List of references TBD (e.g. URL's, publications that can give more information or have informed the approach).
Related patterns: Web conference is a very similar use case. The only difference lies on the timeframe, whereas a web
conference is an ad-hoc solution, real-time collaboration on documents is used over a longer time period.
