Many business processes are both long running and transactional in nature.
They are also mostly multi-user processes. This paper presents a novel approach to implementing long-lived transactions within distributed object environments. The UOW approach describes a well-structured distributed object architecture that can easily be integrated with distributed object systems. Use of the framework enables object developers to focus on business logic, with the framework infrastructure providing functions required to support the desired semantics. We discuss the framework programming model, how it provides transactional behavior to long running business processes and some of the research challenges still ahead of us.