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 ...