Adapting COTS Applications: an Experience Report

We have gained considerable experience with adapting COTS products to act variously as interfaces to problem-specific functionality and to provide such functionality itself. Several experimental implementations were based on a tool called the Briefing Associate that augmented Microsoft's PowerPoint to support the authoring of semantically grounded applications. Others were based on other Microsoft Office products, such as Access and Excel, and yet others were based on modeling tools such as IBM Rational Rose or Mathwork's MatLab. This report both gives a feeling for how applications can be augmented with such COTS interfaces and also discusses some of the problems that anyone adapting COTS tools is certain to face.