CSA, a Hierarchical Object-Oriented Architecture for Distributed Office Systems

This paper outlines the architecture for office communication being developed by ESPRIT Project 237, Communication Systems Architecture (CSA).Starting from a particular sociological model of the office environment, CSA is developed around the concept of a domain, which is a set of intensively interacting systems and resources, typically belonging to the same organisation.The architectural model of a domain is a layered abstract machine hierarchy. Each layer solves a specific problem to gain a unique single system image for the application programmer independent from heterogeneity, distribution or different architectures outside a domain.The general unifying concept within this architecture is the CSA object model, which is implemented by an abstract machine hierarchy.