 |
 |
Distributed Computing
Applications and Infrastructure (IS 206)[Group E Home] | [IS206 Home]
Overview
Global Web Developer is the only computing application on the market
to integrate all the important features an organization requires for web
development. Whether it is used to author the first page of a brand new
site or to analyze visitor traffic patterns in order to suggest structural
changes to a complex web site, Global Web Developer transforms an organization's
web development process every step of the way.
All the features and functions organizations currently assemble from multiple
software packages to help them develop great web sites can now be assembled
instead with the single acquisition of Global Web Developer. But in addition
to being the only complete web development solution, Global Web
Developer innovates new features not offered by any other application.
The unique tools included in this application give webmasters the power
to make vast websites more tightly interconnected and more responsive
to the information seeking needs of visitors. These special tools take
Global Web Developer way beyond other applications which meet only basic
development needs. This application does that too, but it does so much
more and is available in one integrated package.
Unique Solutions
Status Quo: An organization has an expansive website which is really a vast complex of satellite subsites held together with some hypertext glue at the highest levels. Different product divisions or functional groups maintain separate web presences under the larger organizational web umbrella.
Problem: Information needs of website visitors do not neatly break down the same way an organization's divisions do, but rather span the entire organization. New web content is linked into the information complex of the larger site in only a couple places despite the organization being highly interconnected. As a result, the organization's World Wide Web site is really a hierarchy more resembling a tree. The competitive advantage offered by the web is unharnessed. Many pages of interest to visitors are not viewed because visitors do not know where they are or even that they exist. This is where Global Web Developer can help.
Solution: When new content is added to a site, Global Web Developer analyzes it with respect to the current site and recommends internal links from the new pages to related, existing pages. Instead of developers merely linking the new content to the logical places in the hierarchy, Global Web Developer systematically compares the new content to the old and discovers new linking opportunities which transform the site into a web. Of course, there are limits to the associative powers of software. People are still the most skilled at finding associations and relationships between separate information sources. To exploit this reality, Global Web Developer tracks a website's visitors to record the associations they make in the course of exploring the site. To illustrate, consider a general store on the web. This analysis feature might unearth the interesting pattern that six out of ten visitors of the general store page "abc" also visited the page "xyz", even though there is no link between them. If "abc" is the page selling flashlights and "xyz" is the page selling batteries, the identification of this pattern will surely lead to a link from flashlights to batteries so that nine out of ten visitors will now buy batteries instead of only six out of ten. Global Web Developer takes advantage of visitors' information linking intelligence to discover isolated pages within a website which should be linked together.
These very powerful sample features of Global Web Developer demonstrate just some of the ways it can transform an organization's web development process.
Read more about the capabilities featured above: Content-Based and Traffic-Based Link Suggestion.
Unique Product
To replicate only the basic web development functionality of this application, an organization would have to purchase several different products and deal with the ensuing integration problems. Separate products like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and Macromedia Dreamweaver offer subsets of Global Web Developer's funcionality, but no other product provides them all in a single acquisition. This application provides the best of several worlds in one box. Furthermore, the unique web management features of Global Web Developer are not available in competing products. The feature comparison chart below illustrates the power available only with Global Web Developer.
| Product/Attributes |
Collaboration
|
Version Control
|
HTML Editor
|
Link Mgmt
|
Link Suggestion
|
Look/Feel Mgmt
|
| Global Web Developer |
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
| Lotus Notes |
x
|
x
|
x
|
|
|
|
| Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe |
x
|
|||||
| Macromedia Dreamweaver |
|
|
X
|
|
|
X=designed specifically for web development x=requires adaptation for web development
The web-centric streamlining of these capabilities into a single application frees organizations from having to worry about:
- The hassle of integrating multiple components from separate vendors
- Which vendor to call when you have questions or problems with your web development system
- Training your employees to use several products with different interfaces
- Hiring expensive administrators to customize and oversee a high maintenance, patchwork environment (as with Lotus Notes)
Unlike some products, Global Web Developer does not claim to do everything
under the sun for an organization. Consequently, complicated configuration
and customization headaches are not a feature of Global Web Developer.
Because it focuses only on transforming the web development process, Global
Web Developer does it better, simpler and cheaper. This solution makes
everyone's job easier. It spares the organization a tricky multi-application
deployment requiring custom implementation of some components.
This application is the next logical step in enterprise Internet software.
System administrators need only support one more application. Most importantly,
a single interface for all web development tasks is all that users must
be trained to use. All of these qualities make Global Web Developer a
strategic part of any web-using organization's software library and gives
that organization a competitive advantage. Besides these valuable benefits,
Global Web Developer also includes innovative and entirely new capabilities
for website management unique to this application. Global Web Developer's
suite of capabilities define a powerful new software category new to the
marketplace. No other tool can do so much for an organization's web development
process.
On to Features
Jump to Scenarios