An Email-Based Interoperability Approach for SMEs

More than 99% of the enterprises in Europe are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). While in the current market situation collaboration is evolving to an indispensable key factor of success, there is a very poor software support for SME collaboration. Especially, such collaboration needs more functionality than a pure technical interoperability of IT-Systems. In this paper we develop an adequate definition for process interoperability (PI) and we show how PI can help SMEs to conduct their business. Further, we derive the requirements for an interoperability solution tailored for SMEs. Finally, we introduce an interoperability approach in the context of the European Project rdquoCommiusrdquo, which enables SMEs to collaborate easily on the level of PI using simple email communication.