The Ricoh Demoroom is part of the Competence Center "Virtual Office of the Future" (CC-VOF) at DFKI. In a cooperative project with Ricoh, the VOF designs and tests innovative software solutions that effectively support knowledge-intensive work processes. The Ricoh Demoroom lets visitors experience new methods for work in the office of the future and, simultaneously, serves as an experimental test lab for new concepts in office procedures. The focus of research is on support to knowledge-intensive office work with a combination of DFKI's intelligent assistance systems and Ricoh's multi-functional office equipment (Multifunctional Product - MFP) that combines printer, copier, scanner, and fax in one device.
In the Ricoh Demoroom, we show along stories, how the work in the office of the future may look like when using Ricohs multi-functional products combining them with DFKI's intelligent assistant systems. The demos range from a smart digital kiosk for information-on-the-fly, up to organizing work on the MFP up to pro-active and context-sensitive support of knowledge-intensive office work. For example, the following demos Task2MFP and Scan2Task:
With the functionalities of Task2MFP and Scan2Task, users are able to to access their personal task list directly at the control panel of the MFP, to print attached files (Task2MFP), enter new tasks, or attach scanned documents directly to the corresponding task (Scan2Task).
In our demo, the task list is retrieved from the agile workflow-system TaskNavigator - an intelligent assistance system which supports users in executing their knowledge intensive work.
All actions at the MFP are executed in the context of the respective task being performed by the user: for example, the commonly used scan-to-email functionality is replaced by scan-to-task which not only reduces the load at the email inbox but also reduces the effort to organize documents required for the task-at-hand. The step from paper to intelligent task management is complete.
This task-oriented document handling effectively integrates the MFP's as a resource for knowledge intensive processes and, in this way, represents an initial step towards the comprehensive use of such devices to manage knowledge-intense processes in the office of the future.
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