Any kind of business uses documents, especially those used in paper work activities. The paper work contents hold huge amount of data. This type of data is exchanged between different business partners in form of purchase orders, invoices, offers, contracts …etc. In most cases, the processing control of this data source is poor if not missed because of the unstructured nature of these documents. XML came and brought a new dimension document structure. As the well formed XML documents rely on a predefined schema called XSD, documents may be processed easier and more efficient. The main creators of such daily paper work are the normal users but it is not practical to force them to learn XML concepts to create their documents in XML format.
Specifically, in those fields that include serving customers, service sheets include the details of services are stored in hard or soft copy. Service sheet documents content are gathered from many data sources. The user must ensure that every single piece of data is up to date, at the time of creating the document, as it is stored in its related data source. For example, if the address of the client is changed in the CRM database today, all the next service sheets that will be created should contain the new address. Moreover, the data is valuable but far from straightforward in processing because the unstructured nature of the documents.
In this paper, we present Active Document model and how it can be used to solve the problem of the unstructured nature of the normal paperwork documents. Also, the paper presents a solution that applies the Active Document model. The solution is built for the customer service tracking using the active document model to create the service sheet documents easily, interactively, and in structured XML format. It enables the normal users to create their service sheet documents using the commonly used user interface of their document editors which are referred to by intelligent applications as usual and in the same way they are used to follow but in the needed XML format. It is mainly based on attaching a predefined XSD to the document to define its structure.