A collaborative workflow is a business process with a set of linked tasks. It is important to share knowledge in document format of the workflow to achieve a business objective or policy goal. When an electronic document is shared in a collaborative workflow, appropriate access controls are needed. Access control of documents involves the correlated setting of security at the document and data levels, corresponding to the sequence of workflow activities and organisational role hierarchy. This study proposes an access control mechanism for sharing electronic documents in a document-centric Workflow Management System (WfMS). A mandatory access mechanism is used to manage access control. The mechanism is demonstrated by an example of generating a quotation document using Oracle Workflow and Oracle PL/SQL.

Electronic negotiation systems have been devised to create an electronic marketplace for bargaining, auctions, reverse auctions, and exchanges between multiple buyers and sellers. Most studies of negotiation systems concentrate on negotiation process modeling and data modeling-rather than on strategies and efficiency-for a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem in which many criteria are taken into account as attributes for decision making. This study proposes an active collaboration and negotiation framework (ACNF), which is a negotiation support system that uses active documents with embedded business logics or business rules that can adapt to different collaborative strategies in a business-to-business (B2B) environment. The risk preferences of negotiators are modeled and measured by utility functions that provide mathematical tools to compute the relative value of different courses of action. The system is demonstrated, and three experiments are conducted to validate its performance. The experiments show that the negotiation process is very efficient, and the results are both close to the efficient point-or the Pareto frontier-and are fair to both negotiating parties. The framework can be used to efficiently and effectively achieve a settlement in various multiple-criteria bargaining schemes in the electronic marketplace.