Spreadsheet Element Sharing through Synchronization

We consider the case of spreadsheet based workgroup collaboration, in which users cooperate through spreadsheets. While spreadsheet exchange through email and shared directories is still the most common way to share data, spreadsheet sharing in the Cloud is rapidly spreading, leveraging the evolution of office tools toward delocalized system over the Cloud. In this paper we observe that spreadsheet sharing through delocalization does not support information confidentiality and introduce the concept of spreadsheet sharing through synchronization, in which both processing and storage maintain their localization in the user systems while a Cloud platform takes care of synchronization. Finally, we focus on Spreadsheet Element Synchronization in which synchronization works at the cell granularity rather than at the file granularity and show some use cases the demonstrate its superiority.