XFolders: a flexible workflow system based on electronic circulation folders

We present a flexible lightweight document-centered workflow system, called XFolders, that breaks physical and organisational boundaries allowing users across distributed virtual organizations to flexibly collaborate and share documents. The paradigm underlying XFolders is the well known, and widely adopted, internal office circulation envelope. We show how XFolders combines the simplicity of this metaphor with the power and the benefits of today's networked computers, in terms of speed, distance bridging and support. In particular, we show how in XFolders documents can be migrated across organizations hidden by firewalls and how we deal with scalability and dynamicity issues.