RE: WebDAV property schema lookup

   From: Gary Cowan [mailto:Gary.Cowan@Tally.Hummingbird.com]

   This situation illustrates a fundamental weakness with WebDAV in
   respect to enterprise document management systems. The WebDAV
   philosophy assumes that the client is controlling the properties of
   a resource/document and the server mearly acts as a store for the
   property information.

That is incorrect.  WebDAV explicitly supports both "dead" (client-defined)
and "live" (server-defined) properties.

   Wheras a DM server maintains extensive metadata for a given
   resource especially when vertical market applications have been
   built on top of the DM system.

Yes, WebDAV was designed with this in mind.

   WebDAV does not provide a methodology by which this metadata can be
   exposed.

Perhaps you could explain what you have in mind as "a methodology
by which this metadata can be exposed"?

   As such DM systems must still construct proprietary client
   applications causing users to perform authoring in the authoring
   tool while performing DM specific actions in the DM client.

As is the case for versioning systems.  To deal with this problem, we
defined an interoperable set of live properties (and a few new
methods) to provide authoring tools with a mechanism for interacting
with a wide range of versioning systems.  The WebDAV protocol proved
to be very amenable to this kind of extension.

   At this point in time it still makes more sense for DM systems to
   construct tight integration mechanisms within the context of the
   authoring application. This gives the DM system the ability expose
   its own metadata to the user during document creation/editing.

Yes, until you agreed on an interoperable set of DM live properties,
each client will need a custom integration with each server.

   WebDAV is a very attractive protocol but this one limitation is
inhibiting
   its extensive use within the enterprise DM community. 

The only group that could define an interoperable set of properties
for enterprise DM is the enterprise DM community itself.  I encourage
you to do so.

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Sunday, 7 April 2002 21:59:43 UTC