Extending the reach of business processes

A business process is a systematic set of activities by which an enterprise conducts its affairs. Various technologies-including pagers, cell phones, pocket PCs, instant messaging (IM), and the short message service (SMS)-have emerged that people can use to communicate even when they are on the move or far away. Many such devices support synchronous communication as well as proactively "pushing" messages to users. However, these devices have no mechanism to control or structure the information that users are exchanging, and they arc not integrated with business processes based on workplaces. To address these problems, we have designed and implemented PerCollab, a middleware system that facilitates structured collaboration between various communication devices for business processes and pushes tasks to users.