University of California at Irvine
Irvine Research Unit in Software (IRUS) is proud to sponsor the

Bay Area Roundtable (BART)

Scaling for the Internet series, meeting 3

Internet Document Management


* Friday, April 3, 1998 *

9:00am-9:30am: Coffee/Network
9:30am-12:00pm: BART Meeting
Hyatt Rickey's Hotel - Palo Alto
4219 El Camino Real
Tel (415) 493-8000

There is a $15.00 charge for non-sponsors.
Checks should be made payable to UC Regents.

No reservations required.


Coordinator: Richard N. Taylor, Director, UC Irvine / IRUS; taylor@ics.uci.edu

Web Based Distributed Workflow
Keith D. Swenson, Coordination Technology Architect, Netscape Communications Corporation, kswenson@netscape.com; http://people.netscape.com/kswenson/

The web has revolutionized the way that we do many things. Workflow is no exception. A few years ago we saw the emergence of HTTP interfaces on top of existing workflow products. Now we are beginning to see the emergence of workflow which has been designed from the beginning based around internet standards. In the same way that a hypertext document can have pieces served from any number of servers, one flavor of new workflow systems is to be fully distributed such that different parts of the workflow come from any number of different servers. Standardization of directory services through LDAP is having a big effect on workflow system, as well as standards in the document management field. To help with interoperability, the OMG is motivating standards of distributed workflow, with the prominent submission being the flow submission which is being readied for voting at this time. This talk will cover the elements of flow, web based workflow, and the trend of new workflow technology for the near future.

Biography: Keith D. Swenson is currently Coordination Technology Architect for Netscape Communications Corp. in Mountain View, California. He has just completed his role as architect for Visual JavaScript, a high level web application development environment which is now available to the public. At Fujitsu Software Corporation he lead the development of Regatta Technology, a workflow tool that allows groups of people to collaboratively define the processes that they are involved in, while performing the processes, now known as TeamWARE Flow. Previous positions include project manager for Framework at Ashton-Tate, and development lead for Open Access at Software Products International. He is a past vice-chair for the ACM SIG for Group Support Technology (SigGROUP). He has been elected a fellow of the Workflow Management Coalition, having chaired a working group on the Process Definition Interface in the past. He has an M.Sc. in Computer Science with a specialization in public hypertext information systems.

Workflow Technology and Applications that Leverage the Internet
Raúl Medina-Mora, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist, Action Technologies, raul_medina-mora@actiontech.com

As businesses seek to cost-effectively grow revenues through increased customer, partner and employee loyalty, delivering responsive service is critical. Intranets and extranets can help organizations deliver superior service. To successfully deploy intranets as a tool to help companies achieve strategic business goals, intranet applications must be developed to encompass all necessary parties inside and outside the organization.

In a world still largely operating in vestigial mainframe development paradigms, several principles need to be embraced to realize the full potential of Intranet applications:

In this presentation we will discuss the tools and technologies to design, build and deploy successful workflow applications that manage the business process of the organization, reaching its customers and suppliers to take full advantage of the intranets and extranets of these organizations. We will also exemplify with different scenarios that illustrate the nature of today's challenges that organizations have as they move to capitalize on the new business opportunities that the Internet provides.

Biography: Dr. Raúl Medina-Mora is Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at Action Technologies, Inc. He was born in Mexico City. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He was a research assistant at the Computer Science Department, Carnegie-Mellon University, Associate Professor at the National University of Mexico and at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM). Since 1984 he has been associated with Action Technologies leading teams in the architecture, design and development of electronic communication and workflow systems. He has been a consultant to major corporations in the US, Mexico, South America and Europe. He is Vice Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Workflow Management Coalition, a group of companies dedicated to the specification of common standards for workflow in the industry, where he led the working group that produced the first standard specification for workflow applications.

Directions to meeting are available

Upcoming Meeting:

Meeting: Friday, May 8, 1998
Topic: Scaling for the Internet series, meeting 4
          Sharing Knowledge Across Organizations With eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
Coordinator: Richard N. Taylor, Director, UC Irvine/IRUS
Speakers: Rohit Khare, UC Irvine/IRUS
                Jay M. Tenenbaum, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Veo Systems Inc.

The Irvine Research Unit in Software wishes to thank its corporate sponsors:

Sustaining:

The Boeing Company * Boeing North American, Inc. * Northrop Grumman Corporation *
Raytheon Company * Sun Microsystems Laboratories * TRW

Supporting:

Beckman Instruments * Continuus Software Corporation * FileNet Corporation * Lockheed Martin *
Logicon Ultrasystems Space & Engineering Operations * NASA Ames Research Center * Printronix, Inc.

For further information on BART or IRUS, contact
        Debra Brodbeck at (949) 824-2260; brodbeck@ics.uci.edu


Irvine Research Unit in Software
Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine CA 92697-3425