My personal involvement in SEAS/SHARE Europe

This page puts together Klaus Daubes personal history in SEAS and SHARE Europe.

The Document Processing project
Document processing at my employing company
Voluntary work for SHARE Europe

The Document Processing project

The Annual Report 1981 reports about the creation of a new project:

Although this poject has not yet met, a manager¹ Dr. Michael Taeschner, Hochschulrechenzentrum, Technische Hochschule Darmstadt has been appointed and the expected sphere of activities is as follows:

• use in adminstration, eduction, industry and research
• technical implications with respect to communications, DBMS, etc.
• implementation issues
• trend evaluations

The project will use the normal SEAS channels to promote exchange of user experience and communication with IBM. Additionally, the project intends to tackle the area of document processing from the point of view of the user.

Further development

From 1982 to 1985 Anders Berglund from Cern in Geneva was the project manager.

From 1984 to 1988 Klaus Daube was Project Secratary. At my 5^th conference 1985 I presented our work done at OBRZ: the formatter Susi.

1986 in St. Helier, Jersey (25^th Anniversaray of SEAS), Anders did not not show up - he has moved from Cern to Boulder, Colorado. So I automatically became Project Manager. At that conference I could convince Dr. Kurt Neuenschwander from BEDAG, Berne (later: Swiss Re in Zürich) to become Project Secretary.

1988 I became Deputy Requirements Manager and hence Kurt became Project Manager of the Office Systems Project (as it was named then). As a Secretary of the project Jean-Pierre Cabnié (a member of the NLA gang) could be recruited.

1988 in Davos the so called 'Davos Requirement' was issued - the ground setting for the development of a new White Paper, which was published in 1990.

Area of interest 1984

• PROFS and DISSOS
• Electronic Mailing
• DCF/GML
• Office Automation (OA) and/on the PC
• OA Output Devices
• Inhouse Publishing

Annual Report 1985 highlights an important activity

National Character Task Force Report: Over the last few years SEAS has been pressing IBM for asolution to the problems experienced by Data Processing (DP) users in non english-spekaing countries when using hardware and software from IBM.

There are four categories of these problems:

• inadequate and inconsistent support of special national language characters
• inadequate support of national languages (IBM software users need to understand the English language in most cases)
• keyboard-related problems: the of 'stanard' keyboards
• insufficient inter-product compatibility

When installed in non English-speaking countries, most IBM products suffer a degradation and/or user frienliness and/or performance.

In September 1985 the EAS National Character TAsk Force issued the final version of its report. This report is considered one of the best documents in this area. It has been handed over to IBM top mangement in Paris in November 1985.

Note: The report has been given the widest publicity, with copies to most of the editors of Computing papers and journals, and to some general newspapers, such as, in UK, the "Times" and the "Manchester Guardian". It had an effect even on non-IBM companies: for example we got feedback from Hewlett Packard.

Document processing at my employing company

At the time this SEAS project was established I was involved in a document procesing at may employer: we developed a formatter to be run in MVS: Susi. Hence there was great interest in the topics presented at the SEAS project. One speaker in the second conference I attend (see column KLD in the table of conferences) was Charles Goldfarb, the 'father' of GML and SGML. GML was one option in our company project, hence the heavy interest in this SEAS project.

For further details you may look at my cv.

Voluntary work for SHARE Europe

I attended my first SHARE Europe conference in 1982. As all voluntary organisations live from the give and take principle, I soon became active in this organisation and eventually received the golden 10-year service award from the last president of the organisation. During my time with SHARE Europe I was involved in various activities:

• Project Manager for Office Systems Project (Secretary: 1984 - 1987, Manger: 1987 - 1988).
• White Paper on National Language, Character and Keyboard problems: major contributions to the contents and production of the document (was not possible to do on IBM hardware).
• White Paper on National Language Architecture. This was initiated by me and hence most of the contents is my work.
• Presentations and publications, see publications.
• Member of the Advisory council with varying and overlapping tasks:
• Director of Publications and Publicity (1991 - 1994);
• Editor (1989 - 1994);
• Deputy Requirements Manager (1988 - 1989).
• Develop and implement corporate image of SHARE Europe in publications and letter head.
• Development and partial production of POPO (Project Officers Personal Office). Rework of PO-manual (7^th edition).
• Member of Executive Board (1991 - 1994).
• Development of a VisualBasic program to support creation and handling of requirements. This included a context sensitive help with full explanation of the requirements process (1993).