Support of cooperative work by electronic circulation folders

Abstract

ProMInanD's migration system deals with cooperative office work on different types of office tasks which consist of steps to be carried out by person playing office roles. This typical kind of cooperation is supported by ProMInanD's Electronic Circulation Folders (ECF). Instantiations of task related types of ECF's migrate automatically through an office organization. In the contents of an ECF the office workers' contribution to a task are kept as arbitrary kinds of documents. The migration specification of an ECF describes the steps to be performed, their possible sequences and the roles which have to be played for their performance. However, in many cases neither the number of steps nor the persons involved in an office task are in advance. Often, there is a need for deviations from predefined migration routes and for exception handling. Also, there are tasks which ask for completely unformalized migrations. Moreover, in all these cases, non-deterministic human behavior has to be taken into account. These problems are all solved by ECF's. In this paper their design, processing and implementation are considered.