Key Technology Of Office Automation

Workflow management systems aim to help business goals to be achieved with high efficiency by means of sequencing work activities and invoking appropriate human and /or information resources associated with these activities. As computer networks are used more and more widely in daily work, workflow management attracts more and more attention from both industry and research communities. This paper summarizes the state of art in WFMS research. First some workflow-related concepts and its typologies are described, followed by the Workflow Reference Model proposed by Workflow Management Coalition which provides a framework for workflow research and development. As the demand for enterprise -wide, large scale, m ission-crit ical, complex workflow management increases, Workflow Management Systems must provide much higher level of flexibility, availability, scalability, reliability and interoperability. To achieve these goals, current research tries to provide more flexible workflow models, make WFMSs more object-oriented and intelligent, support synchronous cooperation and mobile users, build WFMSs on the World Wide Web, distribute workflow enactment among multiple workflow engines, provide transaction control in workflow instance execution, and interconnect heterogeneous WFMSs. The importances of these aspects to workflow management, strategies adopted to overcome these difficulties are then analyzed in detail.In order to solve new problems and meet new demands for the development of the Office Automation System in Web environment, this article presents a new idea that is combination the workflow development method with Web technologies to develop OA system. To illustrate the idea, an application is given.