DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COLLABORATIVE AND FILE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR MOBILE APPLICATIONS

ABSTRACT

Collaborative work and file management is one of the major functions in any organization. According to the Collins English dictionary, 11th edition, collaboration entails working together to achieve a common goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in order to realize shared goals. Traditionally, team members have to be within the same space in order to effectively work together towards achieving desired goals thus making distance and individual location a trade off for the growth of a project's development. In essence, if a potential member of a project team happens to be in a different geographic location, the project would automatically be on hold pending his return. This is not ideal with respect to the collaborative development of a project.On the other hand, file management refers to the manipulation of documents and data on a computer system which may often include creating, editing, storing and accessing of files. In most computer system's files are stored locally on the systems hard disk (possibly in different formats) thus occupying memory space which of course is limited in size. Not only is there an issue of inadequate memory space, other factors such as viral attacks, damage etc. can cause loss of vital files on a particular system.In order to solve the issue of distance as a trade off to a project's development and also the issue of effective file management, the research team has design and developed a cloud-based collaboration and file management system targeted at mobile device end users.Cloud computing, often referred to as simply "the cloud" is the development of on- demand computing resources - everything from application to data Centre's- over the internet and on a pay-for-use basis.