influnce

The Hatter went on in a mournful
tone, “And ever since then, time
won’t do a thing that I ask! It’s
always six o’clock now.” A
bright idea came into Alice’s head.
“Is that the reason so many tea-things
are put out here?” she asked. “Yes,
that’s it,” said the Hatter with a
sigh: “It’s always tea-time, and
we’ve no time to wash the things
between whiles.” “Then, you keep
moving round, I suppose?” said Alice. “Exactly so,” said
the Hatter: “as the things get used up.” “But, what happens
when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured
to ask. “Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare
interrupted [5]. Frequent prototyping during our early efforts to
build a Web information system (WIS) reminded us
of the Hatter’s comment, “it’s always tea-time …”
We often changed design strategies to take advantage
of ever-changing Web technologies, making it difficult
to move forward with “no time to wash the things between whiles.” Also, the advent of easy-touse Web authoring and management tools increased
the desire for instant publishing, thereby trivializing
the need for careful planning, foresight, and a systematic
design methodology.
A Marketing Information System
Wonderland
Merrill Lynch provides financial management and
advisory services to millions of households and businesses.
Through its Trusted Global Advisor (TGA)
initiative, Merrill Lynch is replacing its text-based,
mainframe information systems with client/server
and Web-based systems integrated under a single
graphical user interface shell [6]. TGA enables internal
marketing groups to deliver marketing information
in many formats and media to financial
consultants via an intranet. Subsets of this information
may also be delivered to clients and the general
public.
The systems development team received the following
requirements:
COMMUNICATIONS





Integrating Document Management
and the Web
Alice Marries the Mad Hatter
The traditional Web model of authoring and managing
content on a file system could not support our
requirements, with over 10,000 documents. One
goal was developing a low-maintenance information
system, easily managed by end users. Responsibilities
would be delegated and dispersed to various
stakeholders in the organization. Marketing departments,
products and services groups, editorial, legal,
and technical staff would collaborate through a centralized
document repository, minimizing systems
support personnel.
System Architecture, Challenges,
and Issues
The Newlyweds
To build successful WIS, Bieber et al. [2] urged
developers to observe systematic design methodologies,
integration, and evaluation techniques. As we
describe the highlights of our design methodology within that structure. A challenge was in defining
roles and ACLs without becoming too complex. We
had to balance strict control and flexibility.
Related Work
Supporters of the Marriage
Bieber et al. [2, 3] compare the existing Web infrastructure
to second-generation computing languages.
They recommend incorporating third- and
fourth-generation hypermedia features into the
Web. In addition, the Web lacks in other equally
important functionality pertaining to document
creation, management, delivery, and retrieval. This
concern is also shared by Rein et al. [9] who identify
the need for enhanced functionality to manage
collections, support document management functions
such as access control, structural and content
version control, concurrency control, change notification,
and integrate link management functions
within Web servers. They call for integrating document
management functionality into the Web infrastructure.
Efforts of the IETF Working Group to define standards
for a distributed authoring and versioning protocol
for the Web (WEBDAV) are a step in the right
direction. Whitehead [11] describes the proposed
extensions to the HTTP protocol to provide meta