OTM: specifying office tasks

Abstract

While there are many difficulties in computerizing office tasks, two of the major ones are a lack of appropriate end-user facilities for specifying office tasks and inadequate system-level support for managing office tasks. We are investigating these two issues within the Office Task Manager (OTM) project at the University of Toronto. To address the user-level aspects of specifying office tasks, we believe that a programming-by-example approach to office task specification holds much promise for providing office workers with facilities to help them computerize their own office activities. We outline our approach to such a facility in this paper. To address the system-level aspects of managing office tasks, we believe that object-oriented environments, because of their ability to combine data and operations on the data, can provide the support required for managing office tasks. In this paper, we also outline how office data and tasks are encoded and managed as objects. Initially, we are addressing the problem of supporting structured office tasks and our approach to this problem is the emphasis of this paper.