The Potential of Forms in Office Automation

Are form-based office automation systems a viable option for the future? Forms have been used in the design of at least three office automation systems (OfficeTalk, Odyssey, and OFS). Forms help ease the transition from a manual office system based on paper forms to a computer office system based on electronic forms. Forms also exhibit other advantages, not exploited presently, that make them very desirable for inclusion in office automation systems of the future. Potential capabilities of electronic forms are explored by focusing on three important aspects-fields, abstraction, and access rights. Electronic forms can have a large variety of fields; constraints and rules can be associated with these fields and automtically enforced. Moreover, forms are similar to abstract data types. Treating forms as abstract data types allows their being used as an abstraction tool and facilitates many kinds of automatic error checking. Finally, access rights can be associated with forms to ensure that forms are accessed and/or modified by appropriate users only. To illustrate the ideas presented, an exemplary form definition is presented and some implementation details discussed.