WWW in an open Office System

The centralised, integrated Office System has had fair success but it increasingly failed to satisfy evolving user expectations. The limitations of a single, proprietary system yielded to the siren of GUI workstations and the flexibility and choice offered by open systems products. In any case, the mainframe was no longer economically viable in the face of cheap, distributed computing power. Coupled with this is the inevitable diversity of computer equipment present in a high technology research organisation of nearly two thousand staff spread over two sites in Cheshire and Oxfordshire. This meant finding satisfactory solutions for office functions across a disparate range of platforms. It is not so difficult to choose distributed or laboratory-wide servers. However, finding corresponding client software available on all the required user workstations is far from easy. One starts by specifying standards and protocols (eg TCP/IP, SMTP, MIME, RTF, SQL, ODBC) and then looks for suitable products on each platform. However there are inevitably compromises, gaps and inconsistencies. There is a price to pay for an office system that is open. Nevertheless, there is now one client-server technology that is almost universally available. It is also cheap and easy to implement. The World Wide Web (WWW) is usually thought of in the context of access to global information on the Internet. The author's view is that it can bring probably greater benefit to an organisation when used internally. Initially it can be selected as the means to provide an information system to help the staff in their work. However, it has the potential to evolve into a universal interface for many other applications. It has a particular advantage in a heterogeneous computing environment. This paper presents some of the issues and advantages of using the Web internally within an organisation. The report of experience gained includes discussion of non-technical aspects arising.