Concept and prototype of a collaborative business process environment for document processing

Text documents are a valuable resource for virtually any enterprise and organization, and in many cases, document processing is a highly collaborative process. Thus documents have to be stored, managed and handled with the utmost care and efficiency. Strangely enough, while other data (most prominently customer, product, finance, and the like) have long been supported by sophisticated database and workflow technologies, until now, documents have typically been treated as second-class citizens, where mostly ad-hoc, home-grown, and often intricate solutions are being used. As a consequence, many of the achievements (with respect to data organization and querying, recovery, integrity and security enforcement, multi-user operation, distribution management, uniform tool access, and similar) are not easily available for documents. We propose a radically different approach, centered on natively representing text in fully-fledged data-bases, and incorporating all necessary collaboration support. This paper presents the overall concept and details of the approach's implementation. It also shows that such an approach-against first-glance scepticism, something often used as a killer argument-is indeed feasible with respect to efficiency. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.