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Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure (IS 206)|
A distributor of computer peripheral products maintains a web site to provide product information to customers and business partners. The site consists of a collection of pages developed by different people in different divisions. |
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From the information about user traffic of each page, it is found that a page about a printer cable has been visited by many users lately. In addition, those users also get information about high quality papers for color printers. However, these products are treated as parts of different divisions of the company and pages don't have a direct link between them. Based on the user traffic information, these pages are linked directly and additional links to these pages are created in appropriate pages so that more users are able to find the pages easily. There is also a page for dot-matrix printers which has not been updated for a while and rarely accessed. The creators of the page are notified of the status of the page and decides to remove the page. Other pages with links to the deleted page are automatically notified of the change so that there exist no broken links. |
Traffic-Based Link Suggestion
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| When a page for new printer paper is added to the site, based on the content of the new page, the creator of the page is suggested by the system to add links to related pages such as printers, ink cartridges as well as clearning kit for printers. The creator can add the suggested links to make the page easier to navigate so that visitors of the page can easily find related pages. |
Content-Based Link Suggestion |
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The site map for the whole company pages is dynamically updated as pages are added and updated constantly. Also, when pages for new sales promotion event are added or new information is added to the customer service pages, customers and business partners who may be interested in these new pages are notified of the new information. |
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Mike is a member of the marketing department at XYZ software company in Palo Alto. His team is now working on the marketing of new software which will be put on the market next month worldwide, in the US, Europe and Japan. A web site for the product is currently under development in collaboration among marketing, product design and customer support departments in the US as well as teams in Europe and Japan. Mike and his co-workers at XYZ access the site for the new product to create and update pages as well as leave comments on others' pages. |
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| The other day, Mike spent a week in London to discuss promotion of the new software with a marketing team in XYZ's London office. After hours of discussion, he accessed web pages located on the server in Palo Alto from his laptop computer. He modified a page about a promotional event based on the discussion in the meeting. He asked for comments about the new page from Julie, his partner in Palo Alto, as well as the marketing manager Ken in Japan. The next morning, he found their comments posted on the page. Ken is now working on the Japanese version of the page. | |
| Back in Palo Alto, the marketing department is notified by the product design team that many of the pages for the new product should be replaced with previous versions because of some changes in the product specification. Julie just chooses the appropriate version of each page from a list of versions previously stored. The pages are modified without effort. In addition to the previous versions of documents, regular backups of all documents on the site significantly help workers at XYZ. It protects documents from accidental data loss, not only by human mistakes, but also by power loss. | |
| A page using a Java applet is developed by George, a web designer in Boston. He is given permission only to the particular document he needs and works on the page without traveling to the west coast. Mike, who hired George for his very creative development of applets, sometimes chats with George using the collaborative environment to discuss the progress of the development. | |
| Finally, XYZ will launch the new product next week. Web pages are ready to be moved to the publicly accessible site and to be incorporated into XYZ's home page. Links to the new pages are automatically added to the company's site map. | link
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A non-profit organization for holistic medicine has decided to put together a website on different massage techniques. In order to create a general reference center on massage from the East to the West, specialists are recruited to develop websites in their area of expertise. Elaine is the chairperson on the project responsible for coordinating the specialists' accessibility and providing the general style guide for the new websites. |
access control
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Mariah is an acupressure specialist in Berkeley developing the segment on acupressure. While Mariah works on developing her web segment on acupressure, she realizes that she should be including the obscure herbs that work well in conjunction with acupressure. She decides to contact her master, Ching, in China to help draft the site. Since Ching is not comfortable with extensive writing, Mariah and Ching use the "chat" window and Internet phone of the collaborative environment to share ideas as they concurrently edit the same site. |
real-time collaboration
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Adding graphics and video clips, Mariah completes her first draft and contacts other masseuses and acupressurists throughout the world for their feedback. She returns a week later to find "post-it" style notes from Elaine and other specialists with new suggestions and references to other acupressure websites. She is able to incorporate these ideas to enhance the site. |
annotation |
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Mariah notifies Elaine that the project is ready and Elaine gives the site a final glance before authorizing to be publishied. Once authorized, the site is automatically added to the Massage Reference Center website for public use and appears on the site index. |
quality control
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| Lisa is an administration director of an international organization for educational research. The organization consists of representative organizations from 30 countries. Lisa has her office in Berlin where the headquarter of the organization is located. The organization maintains a web site created collaboratively by members all over the world. From an administrative point of view, Lisa is very concerned about the equal environment for sharing information among member countries. Because web browsers are available all over the world regardless of the platform available in the country, Lisa doesn't need to worry about distribution of software to create collaborative environment for the organizations research. In addition, members are able to share the research in their country by putting research papers on the web. | |
| Using the collaborative environment, now members in France, Sweden, Canada and Singapore are carrying on a research to compare educational standards among these countries. The final report of the research will be published on the web. | collaborative
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| There are many such pages connected to the homepage of the organization's headquarter in Berlin as well as local web sites of member countries. Although these sites are stored in separate location physically, a server in Berlin keeps link information of these pages in diverse locations. The link information is used to maintain index of all pages of the organization as a whole and to create a site map. Thanks to this feature, the site is always kept in good shape. | link
management |
| In addition, usage of pages are recorded. Depending on the usage pattern of visitors of the pages, some pages may be modified to be directly linked from the home page so that it becomes more accessible to all visitors. Or, if a page is not used at all, it will be removed from the site. Lisa is also able to observe the activities of members by looking at the usage information. She sometimes offers a helping hand for a particular project according to a log of documents usage so that the project is carried on more smoothly. | labor
tracking |
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