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Practical Internet Groupware
book

Practical Internet Groupware

by Jon Udell
October 1999
Beginner content levelBeginner
521 pages
15h 28m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Practical Internet Groupware

Shared Versus Annotated Data Stores

At its most minimal, groupware is just software that can read and write a shared data store. But wait a minute; doesn’t a simple Novell NetWare file-sharing network qualify as groupware according to this definition? Yes, it does. Who among us hasn’t played out the following dialogue?

You: “Where’s the schedule?”
Me: “It’s on drive T:, july98.xls.”

More of us do more of our business this way than we care to admit. We realize that it’s a flawed mechanism, but we tend not to analyze why it’s flawed. There are two reasons. First, the file-sharing approach relies on an unannotated data store. A tree of filenames can describe only so much about its contents. Things got much better when long filenames became standard, but a bare hierarchical namespace remains an impoverished way to describe a data store that houses the intellectual capital of an enterprise.

The second flaw with the file-sharing approach is that it isn’t, in and of itself, a mode of communication. After you copy july98.xls to drive T:, you have to tell someone—maybe everyone—that it’s there. Hollering “It’s on drive T:” over your cubicle wall to everyone within earshot was the time-honored way. But now that everyone is either working at home, or traveling, or in a satellite office on the other side of the continent, we need to project our voices through digital networks. Enter email.

Email appears to solve both of the problems with file-sharing. It does annotate the data store, in the sense ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565925378Catalog PageErrata