Office automation

Bibliography: p. 100-104.Office automation systems have become an essential tool for the operation of the modern office. With the emphasis of a modern office being placed on efficiency and ease of communication, office automation systems have become the backbone of successful businesses. COSNET is a prototype office automation system designed and implemented at the Department of the University of Cape Town and runs on Personal Computers that are linked to a NCR UNIX TOWER, which acts as the host. This dissertation investigates the different facilities supported by some of the office automation systems compared in this thesis, and describes the COSNET features. This prototype office automation system supports many of the facilities that are supported by large office automation systems. COSNET allows the user to define any MS-DOS based editor or word processor, and uses a simple editor for the creation of mail. The electronic filing facility allows documents to be created, filed, retrieved and deleted, and thus provides the users with the necessary features for document exchange. A user may set access permissions to each of his documents and may grant other users either read or write access to a specific document. The mail facility lets the user read, file, forward, delete and print a message, and supports classification of mail. A calendar facility is used as an electronic diary and stores all the user's schedules. These schedules may be viewed in either daily, weekly and monthly display modes. Read and write access to the calendar can be set by the user, in order to allow other users to manipulate his schedules. Any MS-DOS based application software can be added to COSNET. This facility allows the COSNET user to configure the office automation system to simulate the office environment. COSNET thus supports most of the necessary features required by an office automation system

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Doctor of Philosophy

DissertationHealth information technology (HIT) in conjunction with quality improvement (QI) methodologies can promote higher quality care at lower costs. Unfortunately, most inpatient hospital settings have been slow to adopt HIT and QI methodologies. Successful adoption requires close attention to workflow. Workflow is the sequence of tasks, processes, and the set of people or resources needed for those tasks that are necessary to accomplish a given goal. Assessing the impact on workflow is an important component of determining whether a HIT implementation will be successful, but little research has been conducted on the impact of eMeasure (electronic performance measure) implementation on workflow. One solution to addressing implementation challenges such as the lack of attention to workflow is an implementation toolkit. An implementation toolkit is an assembly of instruments such as checklists, forms, and planning documents. We developed an initial eMeasure Implementation Toolkit for the heart failure (HF) eMeasure to allow QI and information technology (IT) professionals and their team to assess the impact of implementation on workflow. During the development phase of the toolkit, we undertook a literature review to determine the components of the toolkit. We conducted stakeholder interviews with HIT and QI key informants and subject matter experts (SMEs) at the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). Key informants provided a broad understanding about the context of workflow during eMeasure implementation. Based on snowball sampling, we also interviewed other SMEs based on the recommendations of the key informants who suggested tools and provided information essential to the toolkit development. The second phase involved evaluation of the toolkit for relevance and clarity, by experts in non-VA settings. The experts evaluated the sections of the toolkit that contained the tools, via a survey. The final toolkit provides a distinct set of resources and tools, which were iteratively developed during the research and available to users in a single source document. The research methodology provided a strong unified overarching implementation framework in the form of the Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (PARIHS) model in combination with a sociotechnical model of HIT that strengthened the overall design of the study

Introduction to Directory Services

The Directory has grown to be an important OSI application as it acts as a focal point and general support for a number of other applications. This work first points out directory requirements in the OSI framework and other OSI applications, as the Mail Handling System. The first version of the X.500 standard is then described and some Directory related issues are discussed. In particular, X.500 Directory as a database system is examined and some directory service implementations are presented