Practical Internet Groupware

Preface

A few years ago, as a senior editor at BYTE Magazine, I reviewed software and wrote about technologies and industry trends. Everything changed in the spring of 1995 when I became BYTE ’s executive editor for new media. My charter was to do what every high-tech magazine felt compelled to do in 1995: jump on the Web bandwagon. It was a dream assignment that I tackled with gusto. At first I focused on clever and efficient ways to transform BYTE into an electronic publication. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Web. Just weeks into the job, it dawned on me that our content online wasn’t just a publication. I began to see that it was fast becoming a suite of Internet-based groupware applications. And I began to see myself as primarily a developer of such applications.

What’s Internet groupware? I define it as four interrelated disciplines:

• A way of using standard Internet (web, mail, and news) clients, servers, and protocols

• A way of building web-, mail-, and news-based applications to create, transform, organize, transmit, search, and publish electronic documents

• A way of managing sets of documents that contain semistructured data representing much of the intellectual capital of an enterprise

• A way of deploying web, mail, and news services in support of these activities

I spent three years combining and recombining these disciplines in order to create a wide variety of groupware solutions. Some helped my own department—a team of three—collaborate more effectively. Others ...