Abstract— In modern organizations, the communication between collaborators is essential to improve productivity. There is a need for mobile collaboration tools that allow efficient collaboration among staff in organization which may be located in different geographical areas and time zones. Mobile and pervasive computing provides easy and convenient access to information, enabling effective collaboration. This paper describes a context and location-aware mobile application, called MP-Collaborator, created to improve and optimize the communication between collaborators in any organization. MP- Collaborator draws information from location, user status and Pocket Outlook Calendar to create a user availability profile, which is published to any other user in the network. Based on availability status, the user can be reached using a simple phone call or a message. Through the opportunistic use of available mobile technologies MP-Collaborator provides a simple but critical service - user presence service. The proposed solution is validated both in terms of features and communication through a series of experiments on real devices through Wi-Fi network. Index Terms— Mobile computing, location-aware computing, mobile collaboration tools, peer-to-peer communication I. INTRODUCTION any organizations rely on collaboration tools to increase productivity, communication between working teams and personnel, thus effectively managing staff potential [1]. Teams can sometimes reach hundreds of professionals distributed over several countries [2]. In the search for improving collaborative work over the Internet scientists at CERN developed the hypertext markup language (HTML) and the world wide web (WWW) [3]. The Internet became a pervasive technology for collaboration and an absolutely indispensable tool for years to come. The advent of mobile communications supported on smart mobile devices like smart phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) offer a unique opportunity to develop efficient tools for mobile collaboration while on the move. Moreover, these devices present features that only fixed computers could offer not so long ago, such as email and Internet connectivity. Mobile devices can accelerate work and simplify coordination processes [4]. Companies are spending fortunes on communication between personnel for collaborative work. However, sometimes a decision is not taken because a person is not available, does not answer the phone or, basically, is unreachable. More than knowing the location of such person, it is important to acknowledge the person’s current status, thus creating a user profile. The user profile must provide enough information about availability, location and possible communication means. Then, location-awareness must be combined with context-awareness, in order to effectively allow communication between the different human resources of a given corporation, managing user’s presence inside the corporation. The popularity of instant messaging applications can be explained easily with the combination of real-time chat and profile status exchange. However, such approach implies that the other user is also connected to reply. When a mobile scenario is taken into account, constant data networks connectivity greatly impacts battery life and communications costs, while GSM/UMTS may be available, allowing a simple phone call or short message (SMS). Our application takes advantage of current mobile technologies in behalf of the user, where other approaches lack [5-7]. The MP-Collaborator application is all about user presence inside an organization. This mobile application augments a mobile device by combining location information, mobile communication (call and SMS), scheduling information (through Pocket Outlook Calendar), creating and sharing the user profile. The communication paradigm allows server-less user interaction, through peer-to-peer communication among different mobile nodes. Mobile ubiquitous computing has evolved greatly since the appearance of the adequate mobile devices such as cell phones or PDAs, which feature technologies and functionalities such as Wi-Fi, 3G/GSM, GPS receiver; with processing power and MP-Collaborator: A Mobile Collaboration Tool in Pervasive Environment Bruno M. C. Silva 1 , Paulo A. C. S. Neves 1,2,3 , Mieso K. Denko 4 , and Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues 1,2 1 Department of Informatics, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal 2 Instituto de Telecomunicações, NetGNA Group, Covilhã, Portugal 3 Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Castelo Branco, Portugal 4 Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada bruno.silva@it.ubi.pt, pneves@co.it.pt, denko@cis.uoguelph.ca, joel@ubi.pt M 2009 IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications 978-0-7695-3841-9/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/WiMob.2009.65 344