Bay Area Roundtable (BART)

Scaling for the Internet series, meeting 2

Internet Document Management

Web-based Document Management
Alex Hopmann, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation, alexhop@microsoft.com

In the last few years, the World Wide Web has enabled the world's first large-scale, globally accessible corpus of information. What makes this especially amazing is that it has done so without any standardized system for document management and authoring.

The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) WebDAV Working group has set out to define standards for "Distributed Authoring and Versioning" based on HTTP, with the goal of providing a Standards-based framework for authoring, collaborating, and managing the Web. The base WebDAV specification is nearing completion. This talk will address the basic architecture of both the WebDAV protocol as well as the newer Distributed Searching and Locating protocol, including a detailed discussion of how these standards work. The talk will then explain how this architecture can be used to enable common document authoring scenarios, as well as more sophisticated web-based applications using XML.

Biography: Alex Hopmann is a Lead Program Manager for the Microsoft Corporation, where he is the liason between product development and standards development. Alex has been a key participant of several IETF working groups, and is currently the chair of a follow-on group to WebDAV, the Distributed Authoring Searching and Locating (DASL) group. He founded ResNova Software in 1990 to develop collaborative online applications, leading him into involvement with the IETF standards process where he has helped design aspects of HTTP 1.1, WebDAV, and is co-author of the MHTML (HTML Email) standard. Like many of today's computer technologists, Alex got his start on the Apple ][ and has fond memories of programming with peeks, pokes and calls.

Scaling Document Management on the Internet
Jim Cunningham, Engineering Manager - Web Publishing and Text Search Group, Netscape Communications Corp., jfc@netscape.com

Scaling document management on the Internet is becoming an important area as information of all types is quickly being moved to Web-based access. The amount of data available, and the number of users generating this data on the web is growing rapidly, as is the number of users who are accessing this data. In addition, some data may be dynamically generated. Scaling document management solutions to handle this problem is going to be necessary to ensure the data is accurate, does not become stale, and can be managed by a large community of users who are managing documents which may be distributed across the Internet. This talk will define some of the issues regarding scaling on the Internet, suggest some ideas for managing this scaling problem, and provide some real world feedback based on Internet experience with the Netscape Enterprise Server Web Publishing and Search systems.

Biography: Jim Cunningham is the Engineering Manager of the Web Publishing and Text Search group at Netscape Communications Corp. where he oversees the development of web-based document management features of the Netscape EnterpriseServer and Text Search used throughout Netscape's Suitespot servers. Jim has been involved in the Distributed Authoring and Versioning(WebDAV) and the Distributed Authoring Searching and Locating(DASL) IETF working groups. Jim's previous work has included research in text-based information retrieval, including the RUBRIC research system which has since become the basis of the Verity text search engine. Prior to Netscape, Jim worked in Telecommunications building ISDN Internet access products, information retrieval as part of an interactive cable television system, and intelligent analysis research and development.

Directions to meeting are available

Upcoming Meeting:

Meeting 3: Friday, April 3, 1998
Topic: Scaling for the Internet series, meeting 3
Speakers: Keith Swenson, Netscape

    Raul Medina-Mora, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist, ActionTechnologies

The Irvine Research Unit in Software wishes to thank its corporate sponsors:

Sustaining:

The Boeing Company * Boeing North American, Inc. * Northrop Grumman Corporation *
Raytheon Company * Sun Microsystems Laboratories * TRW

Supporting:

Beckman Instruments * Continuus Software Corporation * FileNet Corporation * Lockheed Martin *
Logicon Ultrasystems Space & Engineering Operations * NASA Ames Research Center * Printronix, Inc.

For further information on BART or IRUS, contact
        Debra Brodbeck at (714) 824-2260; brodbeck@ics.uci.edu