Extending group communication facilities to support complex distributed office procedures

Complex distributed office procedures are based on sequential and parallel execution of basic services offered by a distributed server environment. Office procedure execution can be considered to be a special kind of group communication with groups of collaborating servers. The paper first presents a general group communication abstraction. The author then shows in detail how the generic approach has been extended and specialized in order to support complex office procedures. The extended solution comprises a graph-based, declarative specification notation for office procedures, and a distributed runtime support environment. This maps office procedure service requests dynamically to actual servers for execution. Moreover, additional management facilities enable external supervision of office procedures. Based on examples, he shows how applications can benefit from the abstractions. By discussing their similarities and evolution, he also outlines the strong relationship between group communication and office procedures