More scenarios for authoring

At 10:38 AM 8/28/96 PDT, Christopher Seiwald wrote:
>Jim asked me to put together a few scenarios for distributed authoring.
>Below are a few offerings, with a bit of emphasis on the problems I've
>seen managing our web site and a few pot shots from the SCM world.  This
>certainly doesn't cover all the vagaries of the problems we need to
>address, but it is a stab at real world versioning of web content.
>

There also need to be some scenarios unrelated to versioning.  (Just for
some context, my own interest here is in understanding how much of the
functionality of sophisticated document repositories like Documentum,
Interleaf's RDM, Saros, PCDocs, etc., could be achieved just using the Web.
This is a much bigger space than just versioning.)  Section 1 of Yaron
Goland's Microsoft Feature Support List is a good starting point for a lot
of these.  For example,

1a.  Jane is creating a new document on the Web.  She sends it to the
server, but also wants to set a bunch of attributes that can be used later
in searches. (author, title, document type (memo, spreadsheet, etc.),
subject, organization . . .)

1b.  She may also sometimes want to create catalog entries for documents
that are not available in electronic form.  There will be no content for
these documents, just attributes.

2.  Jane is looking at the list of monthly reports available on the server.
She selects one from the list that she wants to use as the basis for a new
monthly report.  She asks for a copy of this monthly report to be made in
the same directory but with a different name.  Since she is not intending to
work on it now, there is no reason to pull the content to the client.

3.  Jane's department keeps its documents organized in hierarchical
collections.  There is a collection called "Monthly Reports" with
subcollections for each month.  There is also a collection called "Monthly
Business Letters" with subcollections for each month.  The monthly reports
are used to derive the monthly business letters, so the monthly reports
appear in the appropriate "Monthly Business Letters" subcollections as well.
When Jane writes her monthly report, she puts it into Monthly Reports/199608
and into Monthly Business Letters/199608.  Only one copy of the report
should exist on the server, but it appears in both places when users browse
or search the collections.

And then there are other cases, like

4.  The first time Jane's monthly report gets printed, it gets converted to
PostScript, which she wants to store on the server.  Now there will be two
renditions of the same (version of the same) document from which she can
choose when she retrieves the document in the future.  She also saves the
printing instructions (duplex, landscape, stapled, . . .) for the document,
which she may want to retrieve with the PostScript later.

Name:		Judith A. Slein
E-Mail:		slein@wrc.xerox.com
Phone:  	8*222-5169
Fax:		(716) 265-7133
MailStop:	128-29E

Received on Thursday, 29 August 1996 10:08:06 UTC