Towards a framework for collaborative software development of business application systems

The paper discusses the current practice in business information and office automation systems in particular with respect to collaborative development. While from an architectural point of view the predominant monolithic structure of business information systems hinders collaboration, the distributed architecture of office automation systems promotes it. The authors sketch an architecture where office automation systems can be extended with active components to obtain business object systems which are able to solve problems traditionally solved by business information systems. Business object systems can support collaborative development and collaborative employment of business applications using WWW technologies.