Large-scale hypermedia application using document management and Web technologies

Abstract

Merrill Lynch has initiated a major effort called the Trusted Global Advisor to provide instantaneous access to current financial information to about 20,000 financial consultants and other professionals across the corporation. As part of this effort, marketing information about products and services will be delivered to financial consultants, clients, and the general public through an intranet and the Internet. A number of researchers have reported on the requirements for industrial strength hypermedia. In this paper, we present a case study on how we have designed a large-scale hypermedia authoring and publishing system using document management and Web technologies to satisfy our authoring, management, and delivery needs. We describe our systematic design and implementation approach to satisfy requirements such as a distributed authoring environment for non-technical authors, templates, consistent user interface, reduced maintenance, access control, version control, concurrency control, document management, link management, workflow, editorial and legal reviews, assembly of different views for different target audiences, and full-text and attribute-based information retrieval. We also report on design tradeoffs due to limitations with current technologies. It is our conclusion that large scale Web development should be carried out only through careful planning and a systematic design methodology.