Introduction

AwareIM is a software tool that was created to help organizations address many of their data processing needs. The main design goal for AwareIM was to substantially reduce the technical complexity of managing information and give non-technical people much greater control over the process. As a result the information management task becomes easier, more intuitive, predictable, manageable, and ultimately less expensive.

With AwareIM one can automate the organization’s policies, procedures, guidelines, checklists, document handling, form input validation, event registration, decision making, e-mail notifications, data tracking, report generation, task scheduling, periodic processing, information sharing, bulk data exchange, and many other tasks in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. It can help to increase awareness, enforce standards, improve quality control, lift compliance level, simplify communication, and save time and efforts across the organization.

AwareIM is configurable information management software that can be adjusted by users without special computer skills to manage their specific information. In a simple intuitive way users can specify the information they want to manage and the rules on how to process the information. AwareIM automatically performs all the technical work required to manage information such as storage, retrieval, calculation, security, sharing, presentation, communication, etc.

AwareIM works in two modes: the configuration mode and the operation mode. The configuration mode allows the configurator, that is, a person configuring an information management system, to specify the contents and behaviour of the system. Once the definition work is finished the configurator makes the system operational. In the operation mode AwareIM analyses the system configuration and manages the information according to the instructions provided by the configurator. Regular users access the system in the operation mode in the course of conducting their day-to-day business activities.

The following picture illustrates the two modes of AwareIM:

The configuration of an information system, as defined by the configurator, can be exported out of AwareIM and saved in a file on a computer disk, just like any other electronic document. Similarly, a configuration can be imported into AwareIM from a file. This allows people to share configurations they create so that other people can adapt existing configurations for their own needs or reuse some parts of such configurations to incorporate into their own information systems.

AwareIM can be installed on a personal computer. If such a computer is a part of an office computer network the people in the office can use the system from their computers using a standard Internet browser. People outside of the office can also access the system as long as the computer on which AwareIM is installed is connected to the Internet. Alternatively AwareIM can be installed on a computer managed by an Internet hosting service provider so that users can access the information system via the Internet.