Electronic Office Systems, International Standards/Recommendation/Specifications for Document Exchange and the Committee Support System

The term “Electronic office system” is a new keyword in advanced information technology. Basically, it stands for the huge area of text processing in distributed environments and office applications based on it. Here, the term text is to be understood in its most general sense, i.e. it is a synonym for “information intended for human comprehension”. The term “processing” has a similarly broad meaning, including creating editing, formatting, viewing, mailing, circulating, broadcasting, fetching, storing and retrieving of documents. Therefore, electronic office systems are special systems for the processing of text. They are special and currently also advanced — text processing systems in that they efficiently provide various functionalities required for document transfers, while these functionalities would usually not be found in conventional text processing systems.