Enabling Enterprise Applications for Services

In this paper, we discuss techniques for supporting enterprise applications for business services. These applications can be quite complex, requiring support for regional variations in business logic, multi-step workflows, and long term transactions. Furthermore, such applications must coordinate the efforts of a mobile workforce that is distributed around the world, and integrate with client-side personal productivity tools, such as Microsoft Excel. In order to address these, and other, requirements, we employ a number of techniques to integrate the personal productivity application infrastructure with the business productivity application infrastructure. In particular, we use personal productivity applications to encapsulate the closure of a computational unit with all of the information needed to execute it, which enables us to carry business logic over to the client side, and then incorporate that encapsulation into the larger context of the business application. We have implemented a prototype, and discuss the application of our work in HP’s outsourcing service business.