Sharing in Collaborative Environments

Shared resource repository
Sharing resources, in a collaborative distributed environments, for example, where collaborating organizations and groups provide and share resources, often requires a form of common repository service (RS), typically part of the distributed content management services, integrating collaborator contributions and making content and resources available to others.

Repository Service
The design of the repository services has to account for the diversity of the resources, of their locations, security accesses, how they combine together, as well as who can do what with what where when why?. The repository service is key to the distributed collaboration process and to collaboration. In distributed environment, the repository service can itself be distributed to networks of interconnected repository service nodes requiring additional structures to manage and coordinate the repository service, especially in large environments.

Costs of Failure
There are many aspects to successful sharing and collaboration but it seems that repository services are seriously underdeveloped in most current existing solutions. Content entitlement and security is often skipped altogether, with typically, at best, some security limiting access to systems and functions, preventing effective collaboration. Limiting collaborator trust and their access to functionalities does not foster efficient collaboration. The investments are lost but worse, collaboration's productivity gains become unattainable. Waste, frustration, and failure touches all involved, especially if the collaborators are also competitors somehow, as it is typically the case.