Product overview

HighQ Collaborate 3 is a cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform that combines an amazing user experience with enterprise-grade technology and security. Designed to be fully mobile-optimised and touch-ready out of the box, Collaborate 3 uses a cutting edge responsive design to automatically optimise itself for smartphone, tablet and desktop devices, with no need to download any apps.

The platform uniquely combines secure file sharing and management with enterprise collaboration, productivity and knowledge sharing tools that allow users to communicate in real-time and improve the exchange of information between colleagues and clients. This combination allows users to get their work done more efficiently and securely share critical business information with anyone in one unified space, from any desktop or mobile device.

Platform schematics and specifications

Collaborate Container

HighQ Collaborate is developed using Java web technologies like Struts2, jsp, jdbc adopting model, view, controller (MVC) architecture. The architecture requires the application to be hosted on a Java servlet container. HighQ uses Apache Tomcat to host Collaborate application. Each Apache tomcat is hosted behind an Apache web server, which in turn is protected by a firewall.

Web Interface

All web content are served on a secure https connection to Collaborate clients. The web interface is protected by a security layer, which protects all communications within the application. In addition to the html front end, Collaborate can also expose content out to clients using a REST interface.

Business logic layer

The web interface is supported by a set of managers or controllers, which is the brain of the application. This layer interfaces with the content, which is stored in multiple locations. It is the responsibility of this layer to do content transformation, channel transactions to the correct component and much more.

HighQ Collaborate is made up of multiple third party applications and libraries. Each custom function is either off loaded to a separate application or is executed by the core application using specialized libraries.

Third party applications:

These are applications written by third parties. Collaborate uses the functionality provided by these application by using integration methodologies like web services, command line execution etc.

These third party applications are hosted by Collaborate within the HighQ hosting platform in a clustered environment, and are shared by multiple Collaborate instances.

As an example Collaborate uses PDF server and Adoptol for PDF transformation and rendering.

Third party libraries:

Instead of reinventing specific functionality Collaborate uses multiple third party java libraries to perform specific tasks. These third party libraries are run or used within the core application. As an examples Collaborate uses JGroups to provide clustering facility.

Storage layer

Collaborate uses a SQL Server database. Collaborate uses core capabilities of SQL Server such as stored procedures, views, query cache to support performance and throughput of the system.

Documents uploaded to Collaborate are not stored in the database instead they are stored in a dedicated file store. Any content stored in the file store is checked for viruses by antivirus software.  

User requirements

Collaborate is a web application, so the user only needs a web browser to work with Collaborate Application. Collaborate supports a range of web browsers including the following:

IE 8 and Above

Firefox

Chrome

Safari

Mobile Devices:
 

Collaborate web based interface is responsive to mobile applications, which means that it adjusts the interface by detecting if the application is being called from a tablet or a specific mobile device. Collaborate does not require a native application to be downloaded and installed on the mobile device in order to use it.

Collaborate UML class diagram

Publisher UML class diagram