Leverage Personal Cloud Storage Services to Provide Shared Storage for Team Collaboration

With the rapid development of cloud computing technology, cloud-based team collaboration applications are becoming popular on the Web. Among all the required features for a typical team collaboration application, shared storage for referred documents or produced artifacts by the team is a must-have one. However, existing shared storage solutions for team collaboration applications are far from satisfaction. Some of them rely on self-built storage infrastructure, which could be a big burden, especially for those small or medium vendors. With the prevalence of personal cloud storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, more team collaboration applications allow users to share files from their personal cloud-storage spaces through external shared links, which can partly solve the problem. However, this method is not convenient for team collaboration, neither safe enough. This paper presents an approach to leverage third-part personal cloud-storage services to provide shared storage for team collaboration applications. Compared to existing approaches, our approach provides sophisticated mechanisms to make sure it´s more convenient and safer. It brings benefits in three folds: for users, it improves the utilization of personal cloud storage space, for vendors of personal cloud storage service, it helps attract users to use their services, for vendors of team collaboration applications, it reduces the burden of developing self-built storage infrastructure. The approach has been tested in kAct, a task-based team collaboration application provided by Kingdee, and the results are promising.