Concepts and Solutions of the Digital Teams Platform to Support Mobile Work and Virtual Teams

New work models have been discussed for several years. Especially in the area of knowledge work, mobile and distributed work provides advantages over presence time at companies: It offers more freedom and flexibility to the employees, reduces travel time, and counteracts a major trend: the exodus from rural areas. However, to provide an optimized digital work environment for distributed teams of knowledge workers, many different aspects must be considered, including social, physical, legal, and technological aspects. In this article, we focus on the technological aspects. Nowadays, a multitude of tools and technologies exist to support the communication of distributed teams, to allow working concurrently on documents, or to support data and document exchange. However, many existing solutions only provide solutions for a specific purpose rather than a sophisticated platform that offers all of these services in an integrated manner and additionally takes care of delivering intelligent and data-driven services in a trustful and ethical way. In the research project “Digital Teams”, we aim at developing such a platform as open source. In this article, we provide the basic architecture of our platform and share the main concepts and solutions we are currently implementing, such as our dashboard, data exchange concepts, or authentication and authorization mechanisms.