A Case Study: The BfA Project

German Pension Fund Agency

Abstract
The myriad of current emerging technologies has caused a paradigm shift in the domain of document management, thus slowly revamping the lengthy and complex procedures involved in organizing paper-based documents. The gradual evolution from traditional paper-based documents to electronic document handling has been more than evident in the past few years. In this current scenario, a viewer supporting multiple file formats becomes one of the mandatory substitutes of physical files and folders to the various departments of an organization dealing with documents . In addition to this, legal requirements for protecting documents in a particular workflow demands the design of electronic signatures and consequent identification of signed documents and signatures by the users. This paper aims at presenting a case study of a project undertaken by Web4 for The Bndesversicherungsanstalt für Angestellte (BfA), Germany . Here the principal task was the realization of the eReview viewer as a Java Bean Component and its subsequent implementation through an ActiveX interface.


Executive summary
The Bundesversicherungsanstalt für Angestellte (BfA - "Federal Pension Fund Agency for White
Collar Employees") organizes the state owned pension funds for all White Collar Employees in Germany. Currently BfA deals with approximately 30 million people, employees (i.e. people paying into BfA) and retired persons (i.e. people receiving pensions from BfA). The organization’s core responsibility is the calculation and handling of the funds to be received or paid. Additionally, health insurance related payments for retired people, consulting services for all themes around state run pension insurances are also dealt with. Headquartered at Berlin, it has additional main branches at Gera, Stralsund, Cottbus and Brandenburg. All over Germany 900 smaller consulting offices and 27 BfA run hospitals are parts of the organization as well. BfA is an independent organization with their own (publicly) elected board of supervisors, and is part of the German Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security (BMGS).

Core Technical Requirements
The organization wanted to achieve a uniform, portable and flexible architecture of a system step by step, considering the existing IT environment as well as the upcoming applied technologies and standards. This architecture would ideally support as much BfA business processes as possible through optimum coactions of the single components.

The main application of the BfA is rvGlobal®. For the presentation layer within this current main application, an MS Window Application is used, which was developed with the script language of the ISA Dialog manager. The eReview multiformat viewer had to be integrated within the presentation layer of rvGlobal® in order to facilitate electronic files to get a treatment in the rvGlobal® application.

The multi format viewer (standard component) had to be incorporated into the presentation layer of the rvGlobal® with the help of an ActiveX-Interface. The multiformat-viewer would be integrated in the form of a control-object, which is provided by the initiator and which communicates with the viewer via the ActiveX-Interface. The integration of the viewer in rvGlobal® was not part of the announced service.

The ActiveX interface could either be implemented using Sun’s ActiveX Bridge (Sun Packager) or through connection to a COM-Interface per Java Native Interface (JNI). If the ActiveX interface was implemented per JNI, a detailed documentation of the interface had to be provided.

The viewer would be solely controlled by the presentation layer and would communicate with the intermediate layer through this layer. Direct viewer access to the document management system would not be permitted.

The viewer needed to be platform-independent and needed to support most of the common data formats (TIFF, JPG, BMP, GIF, etc) and others, which would be used in the future. Possibility of enhancement of the viewer with user specific file formats through a relevant API function had to be there.

For the integration into the presentation layer of the rvGlobal® system, the viewer needed to be available as a JavaBean and for the integration into a browser based solution the viewer needed to be available as an Applet.

The viewer would at least support the Java versions J2SE 1.4.2 and J2EE 1.4.

The viewer would ideally run in JBoss and Web Sphere and would support common Web server & application server architectures.


Core Functional Requirements
In general, the product needed to support basic Windows handling standards, such as Copy, Cut & Paste, multiple selections, print output. The user interface needed to focus on user tasks and activity, for example, it needed to come with a user task oriented system menu and context sensitive user guidance.

The product's response behavior would only vary a little upon equal user actions. The correction of erroneous input (undo) as well as its re-appliance (redo) would be ideally possible without having to duplicate the input action.

If the product could not perform a user command due to erroneous or incomplete handling, this needed to be clearly explained to the user.

The product would ideally contain an integrated and always accessible help system. The help system needed to support a task oriented as well as a keyword oriented search function. The descriptional strings in menus and dialogs needed to be brief and self-explaining.

The product needed to always inform the user about the status of the system, i.e. it would always ideally be made clear to the user if the action triggered was in work, or if the system was waiting for new or additional input, or if the system was busy (e.g., provision of a progress bar during loading of large documents etc).

To reduce the data transfer the viewer would need to be capable of loading large documents in various parts and would need to show these parts upon request (lazy loading). Furthermore, a simple data transfer (Copy & Paste) between the data in the viewer (when available as text) as well as other areas of the presentation layer would be ideally possible without forcing the user to manually copy such information. The product needed to provide a JAVA API for integration into DMS/PDM/ERP/MRP/CRM systems.

The viewer needed to support the adding of markups without changing the document. These markups would ideally be stored separately from the document as a file or could be saved and loaded as a byte stream. When printing or viewing a document these markups can be shown or hidden.

The following kinds of markups were required to be supported:

• Text Notes
• Text Markup
• Geometrical Markups
• Bookmarks / Hyperlinks
  
  

List of functionality blocks required:

• Printing (all/selected pages, w/o markups)
• Incremental Zoom In/Out
• Manual Zoom
• Pan
• Rotation in steps of 90°
• Reset
• Anti-Aliasing
• First/Last & Next/Previous Page
• Multiple Document Interface
• Markup Functionality (Arc, Circle, Rectangle, Text, Arrow, Polylines, Color Attributes)
• Save & Load Markups
• Copy, Cut & Paste Markups
• Markup Layering (Hide & Show)
• Text Search (when applicable)
• Context Sensitive Help
  
  

Current (2004+) and future versions of file formats had to be supported:

• TIFF
• Multipage-TIFF
• GIF
• Acrobat PDF
• Windows Bitmap
• JPG
• Multimedia MPEG
• DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine)
• Rich Text Format
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Visio
• Microsoft Word for Windows
• Microsoft Excel
• XML (via transformation through XSL into XHTML)
  
  

Web4’s Solution
eReview has exhibited a proven excellence in its view and markup technology and has pioneered in the same for over a decade now. The standard eReview product consists of a web-based document review system wherein all kinds of enterprise data and documents can be viewed or co-viewed in their native format within an asynchronous or a real-time synchronous meeting environment. At the core, eReview is a view and markup system that reads hundreds of formats ranging from office documents to 3D CAD models, raster images to 2D drawings, multimedia formats to postscripts and PDFs, medical images to PCBs and electrical schematics without the help of the originating application. In addition to view and print functions, eReview has a very extensive markup paradigm. Powerful markup tools are available to create graphical and text-based annotations while reviewing documents from server. eReview supports a multi-layer, multi-author, multi-file markup paradigm where each meeting attendee’s annotations are stored on a separate layer for easy individual reviewing and group review. Multiple markup objects including circle, arc, square, WYSIWYG text, rectangle, clouds, line, free hand, picture object, etc are available. Moreover, eReview has a rich set of APIs to allow integration with other enterprise-wide applications at various levels.

Most of the functional requirements for view and markup were already present off-the-shelf in the ereview product. As implied by the technical requirements stated above, the main task was to incorporate the viewer into the presentation layer of the rvGlobal® application via an Active-X interface. This interface could be offered by the supplier as a standard product (if present) as well as a separate development task.

The multiformat viewer is realized as a JavaBean, which would be integrated into the presentation layer of rvGlobal® via an ActiveX-Interface. The functions offered by the viewer are provided as Java-Methods as well as ActiveX-Methods. This consequently enables the incorporation of the viewer into rvGlobal® or any other J2EE-Application.

Within the basis of the rvGlobal®-System the ActiveX-Interface is integrated via a Control-Object of the ISA Dialog Manager. This Control-Object encapsulates all methods and events which are offered by the ActiveX-Object with respect to the rvGlobal®-System's basis.

Thus, the Control-System also represents a float, via which the functionality of the Viewer-Object (JavaBean) may be mapped onto the functionality of the rvGlobal®-User Interface. In order to integrate the viewer, the requirements of rvGlobal® merely had to be functionally fulfilled. The naming conventions of the single methods could be freely specified.

The design of the user interface is completely controllable by the program. All functions, which concern the design of the user interface, are callable as methods by the application. (for instance: zooming, turning, swapping,etc.)

It is possible to readout files, which are selected within the viewer, per method call. (The format of the float must be compatible with the text-format.)

All methods of the client-viewer use parameter in text-format (File type String) in order to make the incorporation into an ActiveX-Interface easier. The return values would be a Void or a String.I/O-Accesses will not be carried out outside of the presentation layer and it would be possible to control the viewer via the basis of the rvGlobal®-System.


Concluding Comments
Within BfA, there is a physical division between the production and the testing/development environment. Applications tested/developed in the test environment are transferred into the production environment via a standardized release procedure. No testing/development is permitted within the production environment. Necessary changes within the applications in use are first developed and tested within the test environment before they are transferred to the production environment. The integration of the viewer as JavaBean into an example application had to be attached as a CD to the offer. The source code of the example application had to be provided in digital form. A working example application had to be provided for the acceptance. This example application had to be carried out in MS Visual Basic or C/C++ and the source code of the example application had to be provided in digital form.

After BfA and LVA (Agency for Blue Collar employees) were officially merged, it became evident that only one would emerge out of the two fully equipped IT departments of these two organizations. While BfA works with IBM (Content Manager), LVA (contractor Steria) had chosen FileNet P8 Workplace. Significantly, eReview happened to be the viewer of choice for both organizations. The BfA and the LVA project (which is still only in the beginning businesswise) can be seen as a starting point for getting access to a number of additional Federal agencies. With the evolved eReview product structure in place, most of the Federal requirements should be addressed without difficulty. The motivation for these projects remains similar. The huge amount of paper document folders handled by Federal and other institutional agencies are driving them towards a computerized solution. While scanning and electronic archiving is common already, the concept of electronic workflow is still nascent. This evolution would definitely take time, as users are already more than accustomed to the prevailing system of paper folder based document management. Replacing this with an abstract media such the eReview viewer would have to be gradual and sequential in order to gain utmost acceptance.