Handling Environment for Publicly Posted Composite Documents

Abstract : Recent business needs and requirements for complex cross-organizational workflows led to development of Publicly Posted Composite Documents (PPCD) – a multi-part document format retaining parts in their original formatting for usability, user convenience and information availability, while providing document security and built-in access control for inter- and intra-organizational document workflows distributed over low security channels. Developing PPCD Handling Environments – Authoring and Workflow Participant Access – for creating and accessing PPCD documents posed many new challenges: composition retention, secure access and management of multi-formatted, encrypted data on laptops and potentially low capability devices. The paper describes the use of OLE Automation, Add-Ons and System Call Interception technique to preserve the overall document composition, while the handling of individual parts is delegated to external tools, native for individual document formats.