An email-based interoperability approach for SMEs

In: Proceeding of the International Conference on Interoperability for Enterprise Software and Applications IESA-2009, Bejing, China,, DOI: 10.1109/I-ESA.2009.26

Link zur Publikation:


Abstract:

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
”Commius”, which enables SMEs to collaborate easily on the level of PI using simple email communication.