The paperless Organisation?

The combination of the maturing technology of graphical user interfaces (GUI) with Advanced Information Systems (AIS) based on relational databases has made it possible to design an application which can cope with the document flow within a large organization. Such an application should allow for the creation of electronic documents in a user friendly way, automatic routing of these documents through the bureaucratic chain in the organization, pin-pointing of documents within the chain, detection of bottle necks in the document flow, archival of old documents, etc. The electronic document handling (EDH) application has been developed to address the problem of the flow of paper within CERN (around 500,000 office documents per year). The tool is based on Oracle RDBMS, is fully integrated with our new AIS system and is based on a client-server architecture. The clients run on different platforms: a 'dumb terminal' client running on VM/CMS, and a graphical client running on Apple Macintosh, IBM-compatible PCs (under MS Windows) as well as X-Windows platforms. The graphical client, on which we will focus in this document, supports native look and feel. The first phase of EDH, which began in January 1992, addresses only a limited number of document types. There are presently 500 users of EDH who have created around 10000 documents. Some important topics about the client-server architecture will be described. The evolution to Oracle 7 will also be mentioned.