leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue) (05/08/91)
Recently, a number of new products have been announced that support some form of "groupware": letting multiple users work simultaneously on a single document, using file locks, overlays, different cursors, and other techniques. As far as I know, these products are all "dedicated" to a particular interactive style and work with a particular kind of document. It seems to me that this approach, that is, building a whole collection of specialized tools, all of which support group access, but only to a particular class of documents, and only with a particluar class of interactions, is fundamentally wrong. Instead, what is needed is a new set of PROTOCOLS for simultaneous group access to documents that would allow ANY (suitably modified) application work in a group context. Further, IMHO, it seems that these protocols should be defined at the system level and thus be the responsibility of Systems Software. If this position is valid, then I would think that the soon-to-be-real IAC and Apple Events capabilities of System 7 will form the low-level "actors" of such a protocol, and what is needed is to define the upper layers; things like file locking, token passing for write acess, and so on. If Apple could get behind a truly generic and adequately powerful protocol for groupware, I think there's the potential for an entirely new class of software which might be the next "desktop publishing" kind of breakthrough that Apple needs and that multimedia isn't providing. Any opinions? -Bill Leue leue@crd.ge.com
osborn@ux1.lbl.gov (James R Osborn) (05/09/91)
In article <19367@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue) writes: > >Further, IMHO, it seems that these protocols should be defined at the > >-Bill Leue >leue@crd.ge.com I know this is a stupid question that I will get flamed for, but could some kind netter please tell me what IMHO stands for? I've seen it frequently but never had the brain power to discern its meaning like the smiling face... :-) -- James osborn@ux1.lbl.gov