Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group

External tools working with an OHS - Scenario

Preliminaries

Authors
Peter J. Nürnberg
U Aarhus, Denmark


Updates
Most recent: 15 June 1997 (initial version)


References


Other Links


• Analysis
  
• OHS mailing list discussion (when available)

Scenario Description

Background

Irrespective of the final forms of the OHS reference architecture and protocol, users will always want to use tools that are not integrated with OHS services. This may be because the appropriate wrapper has not been built for a particular tool, the tool provides OHS-like services in a way not compliant with OHSWG standards, or the tool acts as an "extra-systemic" client or server to programs that do comply.

Scenario

Bob is an advertising executive. He is at his computer building a presentation for a client. The people at Bob's company use Documentum to manage documents pertaining to advertising campaigns. He brings up the documents that outline the client's requirements and objectives for this campaign and some information about the client's product. He displays these tools in his favorite OHSWG compliant document application, building links between sections of documents using the OHSWG link server.

Bob likes to build storyboards illustrating his ideas in an application that was built in-house. No OHSWG wrapper has been built for this application, so he is not able to link to or from it. Instead, he has to provide non-automated references between other materials and his storyboard, inserting phrases like "see storyboard #123, frame #6" in documents.

When he is finished with his draft, he sends it to his boss Betty. Betty is a pretty busy person, so it's hard to get much of her time. This means that he is often unable to schedule time with her to go over his draft. Bob has learned that it's best to anticipate some of Betty's questions and provide answers to these questions, so that Betty doesn't need to send the whole draft back over a minor misunderstanding. He has taken to building a small "FAQ" like sheet for his drafts with an application that allows him to build Microsoft help file format documents. Both he and Betty like the hypertext interface to these file. Although he could use an OHSWG authoring tool, he's built these help files with this application for a long time, and he doesn't see any value in switching to the OHSWG tools for this very simple task.