Design And Realization Of Cooperative Workflow System Based On Web Services

With the rapid development of economy and technology, higher requirements of enterprises for information management come up, in order to cope with the intensive competition. As an important direction of the research of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow is a core technology which implements enterprise business process modeling, simulation, optimization, management, integration, and consequent automation. Workflow technology, with the development of software and hardware especially the spread of Internet, expands from traditional office work to multi-department cooperation working, and provides supporting of business running and department application integration. So workflow system needs to make some promotion in integrated isomerous system application, reliability, and platform independency.Web services is a standardized weak coupling structure. It provides a distribution application platform and implements application services with XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI etc. XML provides a standard data exchanging format between various applications, SOAP takes charge of the calling of Web services, WSDL gives us a formal description of Web services, and UDDI introduces the ability to publish and discover Web services. Web services has been the first solution in isomerous system integration field. It has been supported by most software manufacturers and has a wide application prospect.This article introduces the effort of cooperative workflow, which based on web services, in the information system, and discusses the new web-services-based workflow system separately combined with the advantages of CSCW, Workflow system and Web services. In this new system, workflow components are in the form of web services. Because the messages of HTTP and SOAP can get through firewalls and routes, the workflow system that based on web services is platform independent, and it could meet different requirements of different enterprises and trades for information management.The project example in this article is the Newspapers and Magazines Issue System of Hubei. Its developing platform is .Net. This system takes much advancedtechnology in it such as Workflow and Web services and CSCW in order to designing Web services of the project. The system can integrate information processing of the different region and different system so as to meet the needs of special work and developing.