This book is a comprehensive report on a successful international project, called TRANSCOOP, carried out from 1994 to 1997 by a group of European scientists. But the book is also much more than that, namely, an ambitious attempt to integrate Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) technologies. This book summarizes the state of the art of key technologies in cooperative activities and transactions. As such, it would be very useful to students, researchers, and technology developers in these areas. Its particular value, however, lies in its ability to transcend the boundaries between the disciplines that until now had very little interaction. Researchers in the CSCW domain, will discover how much more predictable their systems will become, if they can provide guarantees that are expected from distributed systems and transaction monitors developed in different domains. Similarly, the developers of transaction monitors, may discover that the transactional mechanisms they created and of which they are (justifiably) proud, are obviously inadequate, when applied in a new domain of workflows and cooperative activities. I hope that this book will be an important step in the convergence of CSCW, workflow and transaction technologies.

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