"A System Architecture"

So lets now consider what such a system architecture needs.
First we need a place to keep all the things belonging to the system and to define its ownership and access authority. This is called 'Asset Management'. It is the center of the such a solution, as it is needed from day one to the end.
Then we need a design tool that will work with existing assets and enable us to create new ones. We already do have to remember that this system needs to run on any OS and printer. So which format will I store? Ideally just ONE!
A business document solution needs to interface with the variable business data. Most systems can only work with a single kind of data interface and as clever as XML or ODBC may be - do you want to rewrite all your applications to output this format?
Then the actual document production engine is needed. It is requested to produce a document. Some requests also pass the data, others expect the document to get some or all of the variables needed. In here you have also the document logic defined. Forget tables - much too limited! What is mostly forgotten that also the formatter needs access to the assets, even to the actual fonts. It needs to run EVERYWHERE and produce a independent, standardized and archive ready format!
For many applications we are now ready to print, so the print services need access to the assets like fonts and forms to convert them and load them into each and every printer to go to - or do you want to do this?
High-volume and distributed applications require another step -OUTPUT MANAGEMENT to sort, bundle and distribute, optimize and archive the business documents. most solutions on the market suffer form the fact that they work on large data files and have no natural way to access the individual document for this activities.
But this is not the end and it is neither the beginning - many documents need to follow a process from their creation to the actual retrieval from the archive. Workflow is the common name for that but its typical complexity is much to costly - a simple solution - so called Business Process Support is required.
Such a system manages the complete -- from the birth (=development) to the grave (=archive) -- life cycle of a business document.
The asset libraries are typically customer specific just as most databases.
Users and applications just request a document and its data interfacing is document specific.
Process support definitions can be connected with the document type and in the document application, access to the process control information must be available.
This incredible integration is what offers the dramatic return of investment of such a solution.
And according to Occams Razor: Anything which can be achieved or explained by simple means is futile to do with more complex ones.

Max Pucher, ISIS Papyrus America max.pucher@isis-papyrus.com

Published by Lotus® Freelance Graphics®