Bringing the Basics to Internet Collaboration

By Lawrence Drinkwater and Doug Henschen

The Web is struggling to move beyond a read-only medium. WebDAV is a new protocol that provides the basics for writing, editing and sharing information across intranets, extranets and the Internet. Not only has it gained broad, high-level support, it just may leave less Web-savvy standards behind.

Most companies now depend on the Internet in creating, updating, disseminating and sharing information. In fact, most document management vendors now have solutions that offer connectivity through a Web gateway.

WebDAV (short for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) will enable distant collaborators to read and write documents across the Internet in much the same way they now can in local client/server environments. A document created with a word processing or Web authoring tool from Microsoft, for example, will be viewable and revisable using different authoring tools. WebDAV extensions to HTTP will let you store files in any file system (e.g., Unix, Windows, Mac) and manage them with any WebDAV-supporting application (document management, workflow, groupware, etc.).

The Internet has complicated the already complex issues associated with managing corporate information. Not only has the Internet multiplied the amount of information organizations must deal with, it has compounded the storage, security, searching, access, versioning and other issues associated with managing this information.

The Internet (including corporate intranets and extranets) does provide a basic level of connectivity, but standards and protocols are critical for true interoperability between disparate technology. Since the inception of the World Wide Web, numerous Internet standards and protocols have been introduced, enabling connectivity and information exchange across disparate computing environments.

Setting the Standards

Several organizations are involved in shaping the basic building blocks of the Web of the future. Three of the more notable forces are the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA). To date, more than a dozen specifications and standards have been adopted to facilitate the evolution of the Internet.

WebDAV is one of the most important developments in Internet interoperability. Proposed by IETF, this open protocol has been approved in its most basic form, but a number of features and functions are still in the development and review stage.

Several major technology vendors are developing and adopting WebDAV, or “DAV” as it’s sometimes known. Microsoft, Xerox, Netscape and Novell are among its leading developers, and key document management vendors including FileNet, Open Text and Documentum tell Imaging & Document Solutions that they will definitely support the WebDAV protocol.

With WebDAV providing write access, Web-based documents and information can be authored and revised directly in their native applications. This will offer a significant advance over existing Web capabilities, which are often limited to read-only access.

WebDAV-compliant products began to emerge this spring. Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), for example, supports WebDAV in Office 2000, Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0 and Internet Explorer 5.0. Signaling its future direction, Microsoft has identified XML and WebDAV as “foundations” of its “Windows DNA 2000” Web development strategy, which was announced in September. Analysts and industry sources expect major upcoming releases including Windows 2000 and Exchange Platinum to fully embrace the WebDAV protocol.

Internet Stats: The Pace of Adoption Internet users and applications are growing at a staggering rate. The number of worldwide Internet users has exceeded 180 million accessing more than 5 million Web sites. The number of worldwide Internet users is expected to reach 327 million by the year 2000, with some estimates as high as 707 million by the year 2001. The United States alone is projected to reach 132.2 million Internet users, or 40% of total worldwide users (including business, educational and home Internet users). With the new millennium, it is projected that 38 countries will have at least one million Internet users each, and the Internet will reach more than 10 percent of the poplulation in at least 25 countries. Worldwide E-retailing estimates for 1998 exceed 27.6 million users buying goods and services over the Internet, with revenues totaling more than $32.4 billion. Projections by the year 2002 indicate 128.4 million users buying goods and services, generating revenues over $425.7 billion, although some are forecasting revenues as high as $2 trillion. A recent survey of global CEOs revealed that approximately 80% believe that the Internet and E-commerce is reshaping competition and the way they conduct business. Sources: Computer Industry Almanac, Inc.; Euro-Marketing; International Data Corporation (“The Global Market Forecast for Internet Usage and Commerce”); Cyber Dialogue & Organic; Price Waterhouse/World Economic Forum; Matrix Information & Directory Services; and Netcraft.

Xerox (www.xerox.com) is another supporter of WebDAV. This spring the company introduced DocuShare 2.0, a WebDAV-complaint document management and collaboration system. At press time, Xerox had plans for an October launch of FlowPort, a WebDAV-compliant capture and workflow system designed to work with Notes, Exchange and/or DocuShare.

WebDAV vs. Other Standards

WebDAV positions the Internet as a fully collaborative medium for managing documents, files and applications. With the Internet rapidly becoming the nucleus for global communications and unrestricted information flow within and beyond enterprise boundaries, will WebDAV become the “super protocol” that will create the virtual enterprise?

Given all that it does or will do to address document/ content collaboration, WebDAV could have a major impact in transforming the Internet into a global document management “system.”This is creating some confusion as to whether WebDAV will supplant standards specifically designed to provide compatibility and interoperability for document management clients and servers.

Two document management standards are currently in the crossfire of this controversy: ODMA (Open Document Management API) and DMA (Document Management Alliance). The ODMA standard is a client-side API specification that provides interoperability between multiple ODMA-compliant clients or applications operating on a single vendor’s (proprietary) document management system. In this sense, WebDAV is similar to ODMA in that it provides multiple Web-based clients running on a Web server to interoperate.

ODMA provides a client-to-client bridge without changing the user interface. It is considered a “many-to-one” solution, since it allows multiple desktop applications (such as word processing and spreadsheets) to interact with the document management system that is storing and retrieving those files. Neither ODMA nor WebDAV provide interoperability at the server level, as does the DMA specification, but WebDAV goes further than ODMA in that it permits client interoperability across any remote Web server.

“ODMA, WebDAV and custom integration are three different ways of doing the same thing — they’re all about bringing base document management functionality into end-user applications,” says Tod Debie, Panagon Product Manager at FileNet (www.filenet.com). “We’re supporting WebDAV because it will make the integration process a whole lot easier. WebDAV gets us everywhere because it makes us look like a network hard-drive to any application.”

To date, FileNet has done the bulk of its integration work with script macros rather than ODMA because the latter is “very application-specific,” according to Debie.

At Open Text (www.opentext.com), fewer than 10% of customers choose ODMA over direct integration with Microsoft applications, according to Dan Latendre, vice president of product marketing. “There’s just not enough support for ODMA because it only addresses document management, ” he explains. “We want to expose the collaborative features of Livelink, including the workflow, searching, tasks, discussions . . . WebDAV will give us direct integration with Microsoft applications including Front Page, Office 2000, Exchange and SQL Server.”

DMA is designed specifically to provide unified, interoperating document management systems by breaking down the barriers among document repositories, including those that are Web-based. A DMA-compliant collection of servers or repositories would look like one resource to a client or application — without changing the user interface. It’s considered a “many-to-many” solution, allowing many different clients to interact with many different document management systems, thus creating a “virtual network of repositories.”

DMA delivers the full breadth of document management capabilities, including some that are currently absent from WebDAV, such as cross-repository search, multi-property and multi-condition search and auto-discovery of document management system features (though some anticipate that this functionality will eventually be supported by WebDAV). DMA also addresses both client and server interfaces, whereas WebDAV’s interoperability is currently restricted to the client side.

WebDAV: Here’s What’s Inside The basic components of the WebDAV protocol that have already been approved include: Locking. This prevents the problem of two or more collaborators making simultaneous changes to the same document or content. By locking out a document when it is checked out, you can ensure that all changes are ultimately merged. Properties. This provides for storage of XML metadata such as author name (DAV fully supports and makes use of the XML standard). Properties can be set, deleted and retrieved with the DAV protocol, so you can, for example, search based on these metadata values. Namespace Management. This aspect of the WebDAV protocol supports copy and move operations. Similar to file directory operations, Namespace Management lets you create, list and move collections of documents. Still in development as part of the WebDAV protocol are enhancements including: Advanced Collections. This extension will support the ordering of URLs in a server-based collection. For example, when a new resource is “put” into the namespace of a collection, these extensions will automatically add it to the collection. Version and Configuration Management. Version management will support common document management library functions such as check-in/check-out and audit trails. This will let users retrieve previous versions of documents. Configuration management extensions will reside on top of the versioning level, letting you work on collections of versioned documents/content. Access Control. These extensions will let administrators set and revise user groups and rights lists. This is crucial to providing secure control over viewing and revision access to Web-based documents and content.

As robust as DMA is, no DMA-compliant products have reached the market since the standard was approved in 1997. And only a handful of companies have demonstrated prototype DMA-compliant software — among them FileNet, Eastman, Hyland and Xerox.

“Customers haven’t asked us to jump on the DMA bandwagon, but they have been asking us about WebDAV,” says Latendre of Open Text. “They want to start using WebDAV to create custom applications and integrations with [Open Text] Livelink.”

While some critics charge that DMA is too complex, it still has big-league proponents including FileNet. “DMA is similar to ODBC in that it’s a common layer that lets you do queries and retrieve documents across multiple disparate repositories,” says Debie. “We’ve done quite a bit of work internally on DMA, and we’ll be coming out with very advanced DMA-compliant products.”

Debie declined to forecast a launch date for WebDAV- or DMA-compliant products, but he described them as compatible and even complimentary. While DAV was not designed or intended to displace DMA, others believe it may overlap in providing the infrastructure need for Web-based document collaboration and interoperability.

“DMA is a server-to-server standard, so it’s not in a direct competitive situation with WebDAV, but if your clients can have bi-directional communication with multiple back ends, then do the back ends really need to talk to each other?” asks Whitney Martin, director of platform marketing at Documentum (www.documentum.com). “We really don’t know the answer to that as yet, so we’re going to look to the market to help drive where we go with that.”

Martin says Documentum, too, will embrace WebDAV in the near future, but she stresses that the company remains an active player on all three standards bodies. And in contrast to Latendre, she sees more of a future in the ODMA standard. “Whether or not WebDAV will obviate ODMA will depend on whether the market moves toward full Web-based solutions or it continues with a hybrid of Web and desktop,” she says. “For a lot of our customers, we see a hybrid situation for at least the next several years, so there will be a play for both ODMA and WebDAV.”

At AIIM (www.aiim.org), the trade association that was instrumental in developing ODMA and DMA, Marilyn Wright acknowledges that WebDAV is catching on. “I think WebDAV will be adopted by the industry and will become a defacto standard, but it does have limited functionality at the moment,” says Wright, vice president, standards and technical services at AIIM. “You also have to keep in mind that WebDAV is designed for Web browsers and Web servers, whereas most legacy repositories are not sitting on Web servers at the moment.”

Wright estimates that ODMA will continue to be widely used for at least the next three years before it is largely replaced by WebDAV. As for DMA, Wright maintains that the standard has a strong play for users who have disparate legacy repositories scattered across the enterprise.

And if Web-based portals flourish as the way to view information from all resources? “That may have an impact in the future, but WebDAV is going to have to have much more functionality than it currently has,” Wright says. She adds that AIIM is looking at striking a formal relationship with the IETF so that AIIM members and ODMA and DMA committee members can help put some of the functionality they’re looking for into the WebDAV protocol.

Lawrence Drinkwater is CEO of Paragon Global (www.paragonglobal.net). He can be reached at LD@paragonglobal.net.