- From: Clemm, Geoff <gclemm@rational.com>
- Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2002 21:59:05 -0400
- To: DAV <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <3906C56A7BD1F54593344C05BD1374B10669099B@SUS-MA1IT01>
From: Gary Cowan [mailto:Gary.Cowan@Tally.Hummingbird.com] This situation illustrates a fundamental weakness with WebDAV in respect to enterprise document management systems. The WebDAV philosophy assumes that the client is controlling the properties of a resource/document and the server mearly acts as a store for the property information. That is incorrect. WebDAV explicitly supports both "dead" (client-defined) and "live" (server-defined) properties. Wheras a DM server maintains extensive metadata for a given resource especially when vertical market applications have been built on top of the DM system. Yes, WebDAV was designed with this in mind. WebDAV does not provide a methodology by which this metadata can be exposed. Perhaps you could explain what you have in mind as "a methodology by which this metadata can be exposed"? As such DM systems must still construct proprietary client applications causing users to perform authoring in the authoring tool while performing DM specific actions in the DM client. As is the case for versioning systems. To deal with this problem, we defined an interoperable set of live properties (and a few new methods) to provide authoring tools with a mechanism for interacting with a wide range of versioning systems. The WebDAV protocol proved to be very amenable to this kind of extension. At this point in time it still makes more sense for DM systems to construct tight integration mechanisms within the context of the authoring application. This gives the DM system the ability expose its own metadata to the user during document creation/editing. Yes, until you agreed on an interoperable set of DM live properties, each client will need a custom integration with each server. WebDAV is a very attractive protocol but this one limitation is inhibiting its extensive use within the enterprise DM community. The only group that could define an interoperable set of properties for enterprise DM is the enterprise DM community itself. I encourage you to do so. Cheers, Geoff
Received on Sunday, 7 April 2002 21:59:43 UTC