Many mobile collaborative applications use resource positioning to provide services to end-users. Depending on the features of the collaboration activity to be supported, some positioning methods are more suitable than others. Despite ample research in this area, it is not clear which positioning method is more appropriate to support a particular collaboration activity. This paper presents a survey of positioning methods that can be used to support mobile collaboration. It also characterizes and compares these methods in order to determine which ones are more suitable, depending on the type of activity to be supported. This information helps software designers make this decision when they are conceiving a new mobile collaborative system.