This paper discusses a global environment for support of distributed concurrent software development with an emphasis on sharing design information. There are many issues to be resolved in global software development such as communication gaps between distributed sites, guaranteed access to the latest information and specification and design resources, accurate and flexible coordination of project tasks, and a work environment that is independent of the infrastructure at the sites. The mechanism whereby concurrent development and concurrent workflow management are synchronized should be the key point. We propose our approach to sharing design information with respect to the above issues. We adopt Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) the international standard for document description and exchange of electronic documents, as our design document standard. We introduce a sophisticated document management system to support information sharing, and many information-sharing applications that can be effectively realized by using the features of SGML.

This paper describes a new methodology for developing office automation-oriented private branch exchanges (OA-PBX). Business communications are closely related to the type of business, information used in the business, and the people working in that business environment. It is expected that business communications services, man-machine interfaces, and equipment will become significantly diversified and personalized compared to conventional telephone systems offering limited services. In the development of PBX's, which are expected to play a large role in the OA environment, how to rapidly and flexibly cope with diversified and personalized business communication needs must be considered. To precisely know the user's needs and to fully reflect them in products, it is necessary to introduce a new "quick-reaction" development methodology to replace conventional ones used for systems with limited services and long life cycles. This paper proposes the rapid prototyping of OA-PBX's and associated tools. A personal computer-based PBX prototype system with circuit/packet hybrid switching functions, which is used for evaluating system functions and services, is described. A new application-oriented specification language AIFLS (architecture independent formal language for switching service specification), and an automatic programming system APROC-1, which is a kind of expert system, are used for quickly and easily making software mock-ups of switching services and man-machine interfaces and are also presented here.

In tomorrow's automated offices, an important role will be played by voice storage systems which enable telephone communication at any time. This paper discusses the problems and technical consideration in designing a flexible voice storage system featuring a distributed structure whose capacity can be expanded at will. Recent advances in microprocessors and magnetic minidisk devices have made this kind of system economically feasible. An efficient new method for real-time accessing of distributed files is proposed which guarantees continuous storing and forwarding of voice messages. A simple method of estimating the required file capacity is also given on the basis of a voice message traffic analysis.

In this paper, a new digital signal processing algorithm for the digital TDM-FDM translator is proposed. The digital TDM-FDM translator, which performs a direct translation between two multiplex formats in the telephone network (time-division-multiplexing (TDM) and frequency-division-multiplexing (FDM)) by using digital techniques, has advantages in accuracy and stability of characteristics over equivalent analog equipments. However from the economical point of view, it largely depends on the cost reduction of semiconductor devices and LSI technologies. The proposed algorthm can be realized using only two digital filters and does not require product modulators or Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processors. The required number of multiplications, which is closely related to the quantity of hardware, is considerably reduced by the multistage structure of this algorithm. The reduction in the kind of required digital hardware and the required number of multiplications makes it possible to efficiently utilize the new hardware realization techniques of digital filters or multipliers using read-only memories and simple logic devices. Since it is foreseen that cost reduction of memory devices will be more rapid than that of logic devices, the proposed algorithm is expected to be advantageous with regard to cost over existing algorithms where complex multiplier logic is required. The estimation of the computation rate is carried out with reference to a practical case. The computer simulation results are also shown.