Supporting collaborative work with process management enhanced corporate portal

Increased customer demands for product diversity and flooding new technologies bring new challenges to manufacturers. Enterprise has to handle flexible business processes, and must provide fluent collaborative information acquisition and exchange channels. Corporate portal and business process management system are both commonly used for collaborative work supporting. The former provides organization with a rich and complex shared information workspace for knowledge creation, exchange, retention and reuse, while the latter provides all-around supporting for process design, enact, control and optimization. This paper argues that a combination of these two systems can serve collaborative workers more efficiently. A corporate portal system enhanced with process management functionality is introduced. Process context based knowledge supplying technique is adopted for more intelligent knowledge management. Our efforts have turned the corporate portal from a passive information-sharing environment into a comprehensive collaborative work supporting platform and an active knowledge assistant.