Dissertation 'Conception and prototyping of Management Information Systems (MIS) with the help of groupware under real conditions by Siemens Nixdorf AG'
The outgoing century reflects the rise of the near information society which will cover our planet with worldwide information systems like the internet. The world business gains importance as huge enterprises and corporations try to explore new foreign markets and countries for selling their products.
The ability to form new ideas, concepts and products from global available information sources will become the key to generate new business.
MIS as a part of Business Information Systems converts data from internal and external sources into information to help managers of all business levels to make right decisions regarding different problems at any time.
Today the importance of MIS grows stronger as the management has to analyse masses of information in lesser time and with a lesser number of staff.
Groupware, especially the possibilities of Lotus Notes helps to establish effectful MIS in enterprises by taking advantage of groupware features like replikation, shared databases, connectivity and cross-platform concepts, compound documents etc.
Nevertheless there is a need to design frontends under Lotus Notes though that they can fullfill the needs of MIS like user interaction, dynamic data processing and the look-and-feel of modern GUIs.
The Lotus Components are small object oriented applets which enable the user/ application developer to build a MIS under Lotus Notes by using additional features like spreadsheet or chart technologies in forms.
The Componets are enhanced OLE Custom Controls (OCX) which conform to Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) but share the look-and-feel of Lotus Notes. They can easily be programmed and integrated with the help of Lotus Script.
By using Lotus Components there is no need to buy expensive and non-standard software products to expand the frontend features of Lotus Notes when building a MIS.
In future even more possibilties are announced by Lotus (IBM) to make designing of GUIs more attractive. Lotus Notes 4.6 and 5.x will extend Notes applications by 100 percent compatibility with Internet technology to allow enterprises to use their MIS worldwide with any Internet-Browser, if wanted.