CERN Sells its Electronic Document Handling System

In a 1 MCHF deal announced this week, the British company Transacsys bought the rights to CERN's Electronic Document Handling (EDH) system, which has revolutionised the Laboratory's administrative procedures over the last decade. Under the deal, CERN and Transacsys will collaborate on developing EDH over the coming 12 months. CERN will provide manpower and expertise and will retain the rights to use EDH, which will also be available freely to other particle physics laboratories. This development is an excellent example of the active technology transfer policy CERN is currently pursuing. The negotiations were carried out through a fruitful collaboration between AS and ETT Divisions, following the recommendations of the Technology Advisory Board, and with the help of SPL Division.
EDH was born in 1991 when John Ferguson and Achille Petrilli of AS Division launched the Advanced Informatics Support project. This had the mission of providing a cost effective way of reducing administrative overheads and providing a modern user-friendly interface for its users, allowing them to focus on their core activities. EDH was a key component of the project, aimed at providing electronic versions of CERN's administrative forms. From leave requests to purchase requisitions, over 100 different paper forms were in use at CERN. These were frequently filled in manually, retyped, approved, signed, and finally retyped again into the appropriate system - not the most efficient way of doing things.
When EDH began, there were no commercial packages available that could handle CERN's wide range of documents, and so CERN set about creating its own. The first implementation, launched in 1992, was based on the Laboratory's big central computing facility. Soon after, as central computing gave way to distributed computing, it was replaced by a client-server model with everyone at CERN having an EDH application on their desktop. This was fine for people at CERN, but the Laboratory has a very distributed user base, so in 1998 EDH was moved to the Web - itself invented and developed at CERN in the early 1990s.
'With this move came a highly structured standards-based programming approach,' explains James Purvis, who along with Derek Mathieson was responsible for this stage of the project's evolution. 'All code was to be written in Java following well defined conventions.' This means that programmers, who are frequently students, can come and go leaving easily maintainable units of code behind - the building blocks of EDH. The strategy was a great success, leading to a flexible system where new forms can be implemented in just four weeks. It is also what has made the system commercially attractive, since the same building blocks can easily be adapted to any organisation's needs. EDH has even been cited as blueprint for building large scale e-business systems.
At CERN, EDH now serves over 6000 active users around the world. Using EDH, people making urgent requests for material at five in the afternoon, for example, can find it waiting on their desks the following morning. EDH will route the requests to wherever they need to be authorised, and then send out orders to the suppliers. Moreover, it doesn't matter where in the world the requestor is, so visitors to CERN can ensure that all they need during their visit will be waiting for them on arrival.
When Transacsys first approached CERN, it was for advice in evaluating a package produced by a software firm they were planning to acquire. However, a demonstration of EDH convinced them that the CERN system was better tailored to their customers' needs. Moreover, CERN's large user community provided an excellent showcase for what EDH can do.
With a client-base of some 3500 world-wide, Transacsys describes itself as a small company with great ambitions. This deal will help the company achieve them.