Open groupware: mail-enabled applications

RELease 1.0, Oct 17, 1989

After Alice takes Jeremy to dinner at the Quilted Giraffe, she files her expense account, using a form developed by the accounting department for company-wide use. The system takes one look at the amount ($300 for dinner for two), compares it to her spending limit -- and sends the report to her manager for review. He puts it on hold, but releases it to the accounting department for payment (by pushing a button) after a brief chat with Alice.

Later on, when alice wins an order from Jeremy, the order form automatically notifies her boss as well as the shipping and invoicing groups. She offers to buy Jeremy a copy of her mail-enabled toolkit and send him her company's order interface so that he can place follow-up orders automatically. If he wants, she'll even offer to query his inventory system periodically, so that he'll never run out, but it may take a while for her to earn his trust. For now, he's content to place orders when he thinks it's time. (This is an implementation of EDI, or electronic data interchange, for which a whole set of higher-level standards -- purchasing, ordering and billing transactions -- is being developed by ANSI and EDIFACT, a UN-sponsored group.)

Behind the scenes

All this can be done fairly easily -- If you have the right tools. Note the use of messages, forms, filtering and external communications (using some sort of gateway). End-users can send their own messages, and people such as those in accounting can create expense-account forms that flow information directly into the general ledger and a special tax-accounting system. The pc support group may get involved in building an EDI ordering system that's integrated with the production and shipping departments. Alice's word-processor has a couple of extensions that enable her to download properly formatted boilerplate from a corporate text base, and to send copies of her letters by selecting from a menu integrated into her word-processor. The only time she used the Beyond or Liaison E-mail system directly was when she broadcast her message searching for information on Malleable Metals. To build that request, she selected "fuzzy search" from a menu, added her criterion (Malleable Metals), and typed an explanation of her request in a short cover note (an unstructured text field, for those who care). For each users who executed the query at her request, the system translated it into the proper format for that user's data files.

Now, a clever programmer could set this all up today. However, he or she would have to do most of the work by hand. Tools such as Agility's and Beyond's will provide a variety of application-specific interfaces to manipulate existing applications and their own interface for user-developed applications, and will use existing transport mechanisms. Initial applications will no doubt include automatic calendaring, and a "capture" function that could take almost any data and turn it into an object. Eventually, with a more integrated system, virtually all the data in a company will have become objects. In other words, you could accomplish work through the system, which "knows" what's going on. Jeremy, for example, will be registered as a potential customer; when his order comes through, the system gives him some new characteristics as an active customer.