Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Health care management
Reexamination Certificate
1997-04-28
2001-10-23
Hafiz, Tariq R. (Department: 2163)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Health care management
C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06308164
ABSTRACT:
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright 1997, Information Management Services, Corp. A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
Not Applicable
STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH
Not Applicable
REFERENCE TO SOFTWARE APPENDIX
Appendix A contains 19 pages.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to data object categorization and validation and, more particularly, to a system which provides for creation, tracking and reporting of data objects based upon predefined and validated categories.
In the Enterprise Network Environment, organizations gather and analyze a tremendous amount of data relating to all the various activities of an organization's resources. This data could relate to the performance of services, such as managing projects and resources or the distribution and sale of products. The information gathering process begins with the creation of a data object relating to the activity to be monitored and analyzed.
For example, in a project management system, projects and tasks associated with each project must be created and stored in the enterprise or primary database before the project management system to begin collecting data relating to the performance of each project or task. In an enterprise or distributed environment, the project managers and resources they manage (typically people) may be distributed geographically and their connection to the enterprise network and the enterprise database may be periodic or mobile, such as a salesperson traveling or a consultant at a client site. Typically, these remote users enter information offline and later connect to the network via a wide area network (WAN) connection (such as a dialup connection or over the Internet) to upload or download information.
In one prior art system, the project managers create projects and assign tasks offline using a local database resident on their workstation. This local database replicates resource and project information needed by the project manager to manage his or her resources. This information can be updated whenever a connection is established to the enterprise network and the enterprise database. In a similar manner, the manager's resources log hours and costs associated with projects and tasks, also offline, using a local database that replicates the project and task information from the enterprise database.
In these prior art systems, project managers create projects and tasks in the project management system by assigning a label (a descriptive name or title) to the project or task and providing additional primary information. This primary information is information that is essential for the native application to perform its native function, typically, task/resource scheduling. In the project management system, the primary information is information essential to enable the scheduling algorithm (typically a critical path or best fit algorithm) to perform native scheduling functions. Such as predicting project completion dates and reporting resource allocation. In addition, each project and task can include a number of additional fields for tracking and reporting purposes. This secondary information can include categories for classifying projects, tasks and resources within the entire organization or enterprise. This information can include a client or customer name or project number as well as other information relating to the type of tasks performed. The secondary information can be used later for reporting purposes.
In many instances, it is desirable to monitor and report the status of a particular type of task (such as software development) or of particular types of tasks performed for all the projects of a particular client. In the prior art systems, an enterprise database query based upon the secondary information recorded in the additional fields of the project and task database is used to extract this data. However, if the secondary information recorded in the additional fields is not complete and consistent, the database query will yield incomplete results. For example, if three separate project managers worked on the software component, the hardware component and the production aspects of a research and development project, the software manager might assign a task and specify the type (category) as “Software Development”, the hardware manager may assign a different task and specify the type as simply “Research and Development” and the production manager may assign yet another task and also specify the type as “Research and Development”. (Note that any of the managers could have left the field blank.) A problem arises because the content type field is different for two tasks and the same for two tasks and thus, there is no way to efficiently query the data base in order to determine the total “Research and Development” for the project or to determine which tasks are associated with production research and development as opposed to hardware research and development.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide an improved system for storing information relating to data objects in a database.
It is another object of this invention to provide an improved system for storing information relating to data objects in a database that provides for more complete and accurate analysis and reporting of the database.
It is yet another object of this invention to provide an improved project management system for storing information relating to projects, project tasks and resources.
It is a further object of this invention to provide an improved project management system for storing, analyzing and reporting information relating to projects, project tasks and resources which provides for consistent entry of classification and categorization information useful for analyzing and reporting information relating to projects, project tasks and resources.
It is a further object of this invention to provide an improved project management system for storing, analyzing and reporting information relating to projects, project tasks and resources which provides for validation of information useful in project analysis and reporting that is not essential to native function of the project management system.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The invention is directed to improvements in organizing information stored in databases that are accessed through enterprise networks. These databases are typically composed of data objects which are used by various applications to perform native functions such as project management or document/file creation and storage. In accordance with the invention, when the data objects are created and stored in the database, the system requires that specific additional information, useful for analyzing and reporting, is required before the data object can be stored in the data base. This additional information is validated with respect to a predefined set values in order to insure that the information is complete and consistent over all the data objects stored. This insures that later analysis and reporting based upon this additional information is complete and accurate.
In accordance with the invention, a database management system includes a database server for storing data objects in a primary database. The system also includes a workstation for inputting data objects to be stored in the primary database and a data transport system, such a local area network (LAN) for transferring data between the workstation and the database. The system further includes a data processing application for processing the data objects in accordance with the native function of the native application. The native application includes a subsystem for creating and storing the data objects in the primary database. The data
Lanata John
Nummelin Jeff
Young Mark
Hafiz Tariq R.
McDermott & Will & Emery
Norman Marc
LandOfFree
Distributed project management system and method does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Distributed project management system and method, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Distributed project management system and method will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-2600883