Before looking at how all this comes together in an application, it is
worthwhile to review some of the basic process tools used and the functionality
they provide. These are listed below with a short description of each.
Mail
Electronic mail was one of the earliest functions on the Internet, and in many
ways is the basis of much of the web technology. The content standards for mail
and the web technology are shared. Mail is an important tool for Intranet
applications because it provides the major form of PUSH.
Threaded discussion
Threaded discussions are an integration of email and web functionality. A
threaded discussion organizes what amounts to emails around subjects and
discussions. The discussion is accessed using the web browser and the user
genearlly starts by viewing an index of the contents in her web browser.
Generally the index is organized by subject, with the primary statement listed
first and the replies underneath organized by date and author. However, some
threaded discussion managers allow the user to select a view of the content by
date or author as well. Indentation is used to show the relationship of replies
to each other. To view the content, the user selects the link. To add a
response, a form is included with each message or the user selects a reply
button and an in-browser form pops up for entry. This is a PULL medium.
Newsgroups can be considered a user-initiated, push version of threaded
discussion that uses normal email rather than a browser.
Document to threaded discussion
This is an integration of threaded discussion with standard web documents, and
is valuable for reviews, negotiation and collaboration. In one implementation ,
the tool takes a web document and tags each paragraph with an icon. By selecting
the icon next to a specific paragraph, the browser brings up the discussion
thread for that paragraph. This organizes the comments around the paragraphs,
facilitates simultaneous discussion among mulitple parties and provides
documentation of the issues and resolutions. The threaded-discussion content
also can be sorted to provide whole document, date and reviewer views of the
discussion. The SamePage product from WebFlow provides this functionality.
However, the current version insists on changing and managing the document
links. For documents without links it works fine, but if you have links be
prepared either to be locked into publishing through the WebFlow environment
manager, or to manually changing all your links back when the collaboration is
complete. WebFlow intends to correct this problem in their next version do out
later this year.
