Success Story #1

Greffe du Tribunal de Commerce de Nice, Court Registrar of the Commercial Court of Nice.

If you wish to create a new company in France, you need to fill a number of forms and then register with the Court Registrar of a Commercial Court. A number of entrepreneurs prefer to delegate these tasks to professionals called "mandataires formalistes" (in practice, lawyers, accountants, etc).

Normally, a mandataire formaliste fills paper forms for several new companies and physically goes to the Court Registrar each week to register these companies. This is a lot of work for both the mandataire formaliste and the secretaries working at the Court Registrar.

So why not create a public, documented, XML interchange format allowing to represent any registration or modification formality?

Such XML files could be submitted and processed electronically.

Mandataires formalistes having an IT department could ask this department to modify the in-house software in order to generate such XML files.

Because a complex schema, pedantic and/or full of abbreviations and numerical codes, is likely to be rejected by the IT department of the mandataires formalistes, create a modular W3C XML schema that models as simply and as naturally as possible all the registration and modification formalities.

Provide one or more examples (i.e. document instances conforming to the schema) for the most common formalities. Reading such examples greatly helps learning the schema.

This schema also needs to be a strictly validating one in order to make sure that what is submitted can be digested by the information system of the Court Registrar.

Mandataires formalistes not having an IT department or not using in-house software could use XMLmind XML Editor to directly create and submit (e.g. FTP transfer) XML files conforming to the above schema. However, the usability of XMLmind XML Editor for this purpose needs to be evaluated.