DOPE/Dialog in more detail

In large organisations, particularly finance and insurance, a lot of "document processing" takes place. Typical characteristics of these processes are:

  • massive output production, mainly on printed paper
  • proven mainframe solutions, e.g. based on IBM's ASF or OfficeVision platform
  • very economic in "batch" and "hidden online" processing environments
  • often "line oriented" output with monospaced fonts
  • poor opportunities for 1:1 ad hoc business correspondence (no individual WYSIWYG-style controlled editing)

Very often customers use at least two solutions simultaneously: the "mass production" scenario as mentioned above and a PC based text processing system for individual purposes.

The challenge

  • Mass production and PC based letter creation are not easily integrated and often require double efforts to manage document templates and standard text paragraphs.
  • Application integration is based on different APIs.
  • Post processing options (archiving; workflow integration, mailroom optimisation) are well supported in traditional mainframe environments, but often not usable by isolated text processors.

The solution

DOPE/Dialog delivers a Java based "ComponentWare" toolkit, that allows the user to maintain all the benefits of his proven solutions. DOPE/Dialog eliminates the need to integrate autonomous text processors in existing standard workflows.

Most document processing workflows can be combined by using DOPE/Dialog components which are application independent. They can be used separately or combined according to the user's specific needs:

  1. A "navigation component" to select the required document templates or patterns from a list or tree view.
  2. A "document composition process"

Standard GUI dialogs for ASF customers:


These software components have been pre-assembled to form a user friendly interface for users of IBM's ASF or OfficeVision/MVS. The necessary host access modules are available to support the "standard interface block" (SIB) as the well defined interface between ASF and existing applications and to access the ASF resource libraries (GIL) and document stores (CLL/SLL). These modules can be provided for MVS/CICS or MVS/IMS environments. You can run your current document processing applications unchanged, as fast as ever in the batch-environments, with a state of the art graphical user interface and thus achieve a maximum in investment protection.

DOPE/Edit

DOPE/Dialog comprises as a main component the JAVA based editor DOPE/Edit.
Driven by the experiences from existing efficient text processing capabilities and customers requirements it has been developed as a tool with reduced functionality but all the features an editor in this context really needs.

DOPE/Edit is highly configurable as a "JAVA bean". One can manage it by modifying a structured (XML based) configuration file that defines

  • which functions shall be usable from the interactive interface
  • what kind of markup will be understood and stored in the underlying content data structure
The User can use his own existing markup (for e.g. GML or HTML tags), rely on the tags delivered with the editor (to be formatted by DOPE/Script) or describe output formats, that will be processed by tools you individually choose to meet your requirements.

DOPE/Edit basically provides
  • standard cut&paste functionality
  • undo capability
  • WYSIWYG writing based on AFP font metrics
  • font/size/style selections
  • ordered / unordered lists in different
  • styles and cascaded levels
  • regular tables
  • spell checking

Final overview

  • build your specific document processing solution
  • one solution for mass production as well as for personalized documents
  • web enabled java based componentware
  • complementary to IBM's ASF and OfficeVision offerings
  • productive & powerful editor