The VORTEL approach to application integration in distributed systems

Cooperative and collaborative groupware work environments like workflow management systems or conferencing systems, often face the problem to integrate existing application programs to perform specific tasks. Although some basic form of application integration is available, virtually none of these systems has provisions to support the invocation of multi-user applications, such as tele-conferencing or application sharing systems. Also, groupware applications need a mechanism for application integration that takes into account user preferences and the availability of applications in the user's local run-time environment or in the network. In this paper, a sophisticated, flexible application invocation mechanism, called Application Invocation Service (AIS) is presented. Based on an object-oriented application model, it overcomes the limitations of existing calling mechanisms. We show how the AIS has been employed within the VORTEL(1) project in the context of workflow management as a tele-service [10].