PROFS, DISOSS and Office/36 OfficeVision started as a product for the VM operating system named
PROFS (for PRofessional OFfice System) and was initially made available in 1981. Before that it was just a PRPQ (Programming
Request for Price Quotation), which was replacement for an in-house manual system for tracking inter-office communications. PROFS and its
e-mail component, known colloquially as
PROFS Notes, featured prominently in the investigation of the
Iran-Contra scandal.
Oliver North believed he had deleted his correspondence, but the system archived it anyway. Congress subsequently examined the e-mail archives. Two wholly different systems also shared the OfficeVision name: OfficeVision/MVS originated from IBM
DISOSS, and OfficeVision/400 from
IBM Office/36. IBM's European Networking Center (ENC) in Heidelberg, Germany, developed prototype extensions to OfficeVision/VM to support
Open Document Architecture (ODA), in particular a converter between ODA and
Document Content Architecture (DCA) document formats.
OfficeVision Family There were several versions of Office Vision. • OfficeVision/VM ran on IBM's
VM operating system and its user interface
CMS. • OfficeVison/MVS (OV/MVS) ran on the IBM
MVS Operating System on the
System/370 and
System/390 IBM mainframe computers. • OfficeVision/400 (OV/400) ran on the IBM
AS/400 midrange (mini) system. As said earlier, all these versions were derived from different systems sharing no common code, only shared a common name. In general an OfficeVision system (which ever the platform) provided
e-mail, shared calendars, and shared document storage and management, and it provided the ability to integrate word processing applications such as
Displaywrite/370 and/or the Document Composition Facility (DCF/SCRIPT). IBM introduced the OfficeVision name in their May 1989 announcement, followed by several other key releases later.
OfficeVision/VM for Asian countries OfficeVision/VM for the Far Eastern languages of Japanese, Korean and Chinese, had a different evolution. It originated from IBM Office and Document Control System (ODPS), a
DBCS-enabled
porting from PROFS, plus document edit, store and search functions, similar to Displaywrite/370. It was an integrated office system for the Asian languages, that ran on IBM's
mainframe computers under
VM, offering such functions as
email,
calendar, and document processing and storing. IBM ODPS was later renamed as IBM OfficeVision/VM and its
MVS version (using DISOSS) was not offered. After IBM's buyout of
Lotus Development in 1995, the ODPS users were recommended to migrate to
Lotus Notes. IBM ODPS was developed in IBM Tokyo Programming Center, located in
Kawasaki, Japan, later absorbed into
IBM Yamato Development Laboratory, in conjunction with IBM Dallas Programming Center in
Westlake, Texas, U.S., where PROFS was developed, and other programming centers. It first became available in 1986 for
Japanese, and then was translated into
Korean by IBM Korea and into
Traditional Chinese by IBM Taiwan. It was not translated into
Simplified Chinese for mainland China. IBM ODPS consisted of four software components: • The Office Support Program, or OFSP, was
PROFS enabled to process the
Double Byte Character Set of the Asian languages and added some more functions. It could handle email, address, scheduling, storing/search/distribution of documents, and switch to PROFS in English. • The Document Composition Program, or DCP, was a porting from
Document Composition Facility, enabled for processing the Double Byte Character Sets with additional functions. It allowed preparation and printing of documents, with a
SCRIPT-type editing method. • The Document Composition Program/Workstation allowed preparation of documents on
IBM 5550, PS/55 and other "workstations" (
personal computers), that offered
IBM Kanji System functions. • The Facsimile Program offered sending/receiving of facsimile data.
OfficeVision/2 With the advent of the
personal computer and the
client–server paradigm changed the way organizations looked at office automation. which was released alongside its new generation of computers including PS/2, AS/400 and ES/390, which was a server-requestor system designed to be the strategic implementation of IBM's
Systems Application Architecture. The server, as said could run on the
OS/2, VM, MVS (XA or ESA), or
OS/400 operating systems, while the requester required OS/2 Extended Edition running on
IBM PS/2 personal computers, or DOS. IBM also developed OfficeVision/2 LAN for workgroups, which failed to find market acceptance and was withdrawn in 1992. IBM originally intended to deliver the
Workplace Shell as part of the OfficeVision/2 LAN product, but in 1991 announced plans to release it as part of OS/2 2.0 instead: IBM last week said some features originally scheduled to ship in OfficeVision/2 LAN will be bundled into the current release of the product, while others will be either integrated into OS/2 or delayed indefinitely... IBM's Workplace Shell, an enhanced graphical user interface, is being lifted from OfficeVision/2 LAN to be included in OS/2 2.0... The shell offers the capability to trigger processes by dragging and dropping icons on the desktop, such as dropping a file into an electronic wastebasket. Porting that feature to the operating system will let any application take advantage of the interface. ==Migration to Lotus Notes==