Extending Cova Functionality to Support Business Processes.

Nowadays business process management (BPM) receives more and more attention and is considered as the "next step" after the workflow wave of the 1990s. Due to the complexity and divergence of business processes, many challenges need to be solved when developing a business process management system (BPMS). In this paper, a system based on Cova, a meta-groupware, is proposed to support business processes. The paper shows how the functionality of Cova is extended with the new emerging Web technologies and how unstructured collaboration is supported via instant messaging, conference service and agent technology. The proposed approach can be used as a reference when improving existing systems or developing new solutions to support business processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]