Work+Flow+Software


 * Background**: Jay is awesome. Rise and integration of work flow software was a quiet revolution. Began in the mid- to late 1990's. Work flow revolution took a lot of new software innovation piled on the shoulders of earlier innovations. First big breakthrough was the combination of the PC and e-mail. The sale and shipping process changed from phone and paper to e-mail. the Windows-enabled PC gave everyone in the office the ability to create and manipulate digital content (words, data, pictures) at their fingertips on their desktops, instead of from paper and typewriters. Next work flow breakthrough came when we reached a point in work flow that machines can talk to other machines over the Internet sing standardized protocols, with no humans involved at all.


 * Major distinguishing characteristics:** Enabled more people in more places to designs, display, manage, and collaborate on business data previously handled manually. As a result, work started to flow within and between companies and continents faster than ever. __SMPT:__ Simple mail transfer protocol, which enabled the exchange of e-mail messages between heterogeneous computer systems. __HTML:__ Enabled anyone to design and publish documents and data so that they could be transmitted to, and read on, any computer anywhere. __HTTP:__ Described how you put this content on the Internet railroad. __TCP/IP:__ Transmission control protocol/ Internet protocol was the railroad track - the transport system that took the data from your Web pages around the Internet from computer to computer and Web site to Web site. These protocols enabled anyone to describe any kind of document they wanted and transport it from machine to machine without any prior understanding or preparation. __XML:__ New data description language, Extensible markup language, and its related transport protocol called __SOAP__ (Simple object access protocol), made second breakthrough possible. Together, they allow any two computer programs to exchange formatted data or documents that contain any form of information. __PayPal:__ A money exchange system that enabled people, individuals, to accept credit cards. This leveled the playing field and made commerce more frictionless. __AJAX:__ A new way of coding that provides easy access to Web-based business tools that you can use to run a whole company online at very low cost. This is completely changing the playing field, allowing easy access to bussiness tools that only large businesses could afford a few years ago.


 * Ultimate significance:** People are not only seamlessly connected, but they are able to seamlessly work together on one another's digital content more than ever before. Small and medium-sized bussinesses, through a couple work flow breakthroughs, now have access to some of the powerful work flow tools that a few years ago only big companies could afford. We are in a world where companies large and small have easy access to Web-based business tools that you can use to run a whole company online at very low cost. This revolution in work flow is surely going to lead to an explosion of experimentation and innovation.