Masterarbeit
Implementation of real-time collaboration features for the TUCcloud document editor
Completion
2023/07
Research Area
Students
Aashar Azeem
Advisers
Description
Cloud storage services like Dropbox, Nextcloud or OneDrive are widely used and some are offering collaboration tools for their users, often through the use of plugins. Even then, there are still missing functionalities that can be found in dedicated collaboration tools such as Confluence or Slack. This work is focusing on the TUCcloud service (Nextcloud) as context and its text editor specifically which is used to research on collaboration functionalities.
The TUCcloud service is hosted by the TU Chemnitz and can be used both by students and employees for collaborative work. While it includes basic collaboration features, like other cloud platforms, it lacks enhanced features, especially in its text editor. The goal of this thesis is thus to improve the TUCcloud editor with collaboration features in accordance to other collaboration tools. This includes more options for real-time multi-user editing in the TUCcloud text editor and to offer task management functionalities. Possible collaborative functionalities include a suggestion view for collaborative text editing, to-do lists, an option to mention users and notify them automatically via email, and creating an auto-generated table of the content.
The objective of this thesis is the creation of a solution or combination of existing approaches to solve the problem of collaborative functionalities in cloud storage platforms as described above. This includes the analysis of the state of the art of web-based collaboration tools, collaborative functionalities of cloud storage services, and additional relevant literature as well as the demonstration of the solution through a prototypical implementation in the context of TUCcloud and a suitable evaluation of the feasibility and usability of the implementation and its compliance with requirements that were extracted through the literature research.
