Office Automation

Office Automation

SI International (SII) is a company that provides numerous services to military organizations. While "SII" is primarily an Information Technology company, they have numerous contracts which extend beyond Information Technology. One of these contracts is the full service center at the Personnel Service Branch section for the United States Army. The center completes numerous tasks and other co-workers must interact with other co-workers in order for our section to operate smoothly. To complete these tasks efficiently, an "Office Automation Software Package" is required.

The most common office automation package on the market today is Microsoft Office. While this is the most common package, other packages are available such as "Corel Work Perfect" and Linux Applications such as "Open Office". The DOD mandates what applications are installed and the systems must strictly adhere to the "Microsoft Office Only" policies enforced at this location.

Office automation utilities a single package to complete multiple tasks such as the creation of databases, spreadsheets and creating documents all of which can be shared over the network. The commonality of these applications coupled with network access to documents and files provides a shared repository where the entire office can function as a unit regardless of the physical location and work schedules.

Coupled with the local network, many offices within an organization utilize several types of software simultaneously. Microsoft Office itself provides a large benefit to the section by providing E-Mail communication with Microsoft Outlook, prepare and present presentations with Microsoft Power Point, write memorandums with Microsoft Word, and create and maintain databases with Microsoft Excel, all of which are shared and co-workers can view and modify these documents as a group or team effort.

The ARMY has created numerous home grown applications to access military records, many of which contain soldier's records. These tools reduce the need for paper records and provide better accountability and tracking of soldiers records. Unlike Microsoft Office and other utilities, the ARMY utilities store records on a central mainframe. When the Internet is down or one of the applications is not functioning correctly the office cannot remain productive until the system is running again. Unfortunately, this event happens fairly often.

To resolve these problems, two potential corrections could be designed into the local infrastructure, one at the application level, the other at the network layer. The first fix is to create an alternate gateway to provide redundant access to the internet. The other potential solution is to create a "cache" directory which would allow the office to complete records which have been downloaded and upload any completed records when the network returns to a production state.

Another potential problem is the variances in computer software. Microsoft has created applications for Office 97, Office 2000, Office 2003 and Shortly Office 2007. Each version has variances and improvements including backwards compatibility built in. For instance, a document written in Word 2003 cannot be modified in the original Microsoft Word however a document written in Microsoft Word 98 can be modified in Microsoft Word 2003. To resolve this problem, the suite should purchase site licenses and enforce that each system has a specific version installed to maintain document compatibility.

Group collaboration software can be part of an office automation suite or an external software package. A large trend in today's businesses is the use of instant messaging utilities. IBM created an instant messaging application called "Same Time" which is installed on every IBM employee's machine. Each employee has a username

...