A Mail and XML based Protocol to Support Workflow Interoperability
Abstract
Market pressure leads enterprises to connect their processes in order to establish virtual enterprises. Development of cross-organizational workflows requires to extend existing workflow models and to develop new technologies to interconnect two or more workflow management systems. This paper focuses on the second point. It describes a protocol to interconnect workflow management systems based on a simple, reliable and standard messaging protocol. This protocol integrates some WfMC normalization work, especially e-mail Internet MIME Binding and Wf-XML. An experiment of this protocol to interconnect two commercial workflow products is then described and discussed.