Webwork
An Application Portal Vision

Executive Summary

While the emergence of application portal technologies has generated great interest in the computer industry, most current proposals miss the opportunity of using these technologies to create an innovative user experience. Current application portal efforts promise to take care of administering applications and data for the user; yet, they do so using the traditional computer desktop user interface delivered over the Internet. This approach fails to take advantage of the potential that application portals have of bringing large numbers of people and a wealth of data together.

The Webwork Application Portal vision takes advantage of the collaborative opportunities afforded by having so many users connected together. It also leverages the relationships that can be detected among the applications and the information that people use. Focus groups with our target users led us to create an innovative user experience that makes using a computer easier, more satisfying, and more socially interactive. This user experience is based on two themes:

• Leveraging the portal to connect people
• Providing easy access to related documents and people

With Webwork Portal, we envision that large numbers of people will have seamless access to a broad range of computer functionality wherever they are. Providing the context of documents and people that are related to the data being used helps simplify and facilitate managing data and working with other people. Some examples illustrate how this user experience goes beyond the obstacles and frustrations of our current computing environment.

• Users can access the applications and data they need from any location (work, home, traveling, visiting friends) and from any device (desktop computer, network appliance, mobile devices).
• Users can pass information to anyone else and can be assured that the receiver can access the information (rather than sending e-mail attachments of data in proprietary formats, users send handles to information on the application portal which anyone can use).
• Users can interactively share any document with any other application portal user.
• When users run into a problem, they can easily get help from someone they know who has used this application.
• When users access a document, all the related documents (previous versions, linked documents), people (others who have authored or edited the document) and activities (e-mail discussions, calendar appointment for upcoming meeting to present the document) are available as part of the neighboring context of the document.
• Users can maintain awareness of friends and coworkers and easily contact them through the portal, which manages a whole range of communication channels (e-mail, phone, instant messaging, paging).

Webwork Portal takes advantage of being able to infer connections among the data and applications that people use. Thus, it has a rich context of how the user’s activities are related to other data, applications, and people available through the portal. It presents that context through the concept of a Neighborhood. The Neighborhood consists of four parts, shown along the right edge in the figure):

• Contacts Neighborhood -- a list of people that you interact with frequently, so you can stay aware of their activities and readily contact them.
• History Neighborhood -- a list of recently accessed documents that can help you switch among recent tasks.
• People Neighborhood -- a list of people who are related to the currently active document, so that you can easily collaborate with others on this task.
• Documents Neighborhood -- a list of documents that are related to the current document (e.g., earlier versions, e-mail discussion, data to which the document refers) that can help you work through related tasks.

Webwork Portal’s innovative user experience promises to reach out to new users and introduce them to the benefits of computing while also addressing some of the common complaints of traditional computer users. Because Webwork Portal takes advantages of the interrelationships among people and data, it creates an interpersonal computing user experience. Webwork Portal would not only continue to drive market demand for Sun servers, but also provide an end-to-end solution for the computing needs of a new range of customers.

  Introduction