UMsys - as old as Unix (sort of)

Today there is the "Anwendertag" (User's day) for UMsys in Munich. UMsys stands for Universal Management System. It is a meta management framework, that has been used for environmental management and eGovernment. UMsys is in the market for about 20 years. Already then it had the notion of people, places and processes - with special extensions for environment and government like substances, measurements or regulations.
It started as a terminal application build on Uniface and Informix. Ten years ago I helped to design the revision from UMsys/3 to UMsys/4 moving to C++ and Oracle as client server application.
This year will see another two or threefold transition. Since some of our users move to Linux, the client application will move to .NET/Mono or something else. In parallel a web client is under development. Here we opted to use open standards and leverage on xForms and XML. Our server runs on J2EE (Tomcat and Websphere have been tested) and uses the Open Presentation Server (OPS). I will talk about OPS in March at Singapore's XML Standards day. Stay tuned form more stories about environment, UMsys and xForms.