European Parliament launches workflow system

NEWS Training starts this week at the European Parliament on a workflow system, supplied by TeamWare and Sema Group. The system - announced last week at Finland's Winternet '99 - will handle all requests for information made to the European Parliament, whether they concern long-term research projects or day-to-day queries. Roland Thorpe, principal administrator at the European Parliament Directorate of Informatics, said: "A corporate intranet is the way forward, as Web browsers become the norm." Until now, researchers at the Parliament relied on paper documents printed from a ten year old proprietary system, which only two people could operate. TeamWare won the contract because it could be fully implemented with a standard Web browser, and the offer price was "extremely attractive," said Thorpe. Thorpe hopes to extend TeamWare's WIP2 project to include the workflow at the European Commission. But he said the software would be re-evaluated before the Parliament's legislative processes go electronic.