There are 19 million SMEs within Europe, representing 99.8% of all registered businesses, and the economy depends upon their contribution to wealth creation and employment. Although SMEs have some strong advantages in flexibility and responsiveness, they face challenges in large projects where efficient and effective collaboration with others is required.

Commius main objective is to support the SMEs with a zero, or very low-cost, entry into interoperability, based on non-proprietary protocols.

Commius will build such an interoperability solution for SMEs, allowing them to reuse existing and familiar applications for electronic communication. The solution will be downloaded with an SME's consent using automated self-installation routines. Commius will hook into their email infrastructure and collaboration systems such as Microsoft Exchange. It will then proceed to establish interoperability agreements with the peers of the SME at the levels of system, semantics and even process. Semantic analysis of actual enterprise data and documents used within and exchanged between pairs of SMEs will form a core part of this process.

The Consortium will validate results using 3 business cases: one business case comes from a technological district of SMEs; one from cross border interoperability and collaboration for European export and one from inter-enterprise resource planning.