Very Computer

1. Using Mosaic as a local application launcher, anyone?

I have a vision that goes something like this:

We have a number of people coming in and out with various levels of
expertise scattered across the four winds, to and fro and here and
there and everywhere, most of whom only get a chance to see me when I
race by their tubes to vainly fight the coming of a Ragnarok.  :) I
have an ever-growing list of applications that I'd like people to know
about and be able to use, so they can better-benefit from their Unix
workstations, but I don't have the time to go to each individual and
explain the revised way-of-the-world to them and electronic mail isn't
a real option in this case.  What I'd like to do is be able to have a
section of my divisional home page accessible only to my local users,
and provide them some textual information -- "the documentation is at
such-and-such a place, and if you need the old version of this silly
application..." etc. with a link to the actual application, so they
can "click _here_ to check out the latest version of _xblast_".  The
users can go off and make a "Hotlist" consisting of the applications
that they most often use, along with all the other nifty URLs out
there, all from a nice click-here-to-go-there interface.  It'd be very
nice to deal with living hypertext documents, all stored in an
organized fashion, rather than news(1), Usenet news, or wasting paper.

Is anyone else doing or thinking about doing this sort of thing?  Is
the Web is the right model, but Mosaic the wrong tool?  I want my
users to be happy users, and I think that the heightened accessibility
to the "world" that Mosaic and other WWW technologies enables could
be the right model for my hotbed of users, and I'd like to swap notes
and do some comparisons with others who are trying to do the same
thing that I'm doing.  Any thoughts, anyone?  

(Damn, I should've gone to Geneva!  :)  )

                                                ...Mike

--

 Ford Motor Company, OPEO      |  UUCP:      ...!fmsrl7!opeo!mjo
 20000 Rotunda, Bldg. 1-3001   |  Phone:     +1 (313) 248-1260
 Dearborn, MI  48121           |  Fax:       +1 (313) 323-6277

2. Root access denied

3. Searching Local Documents and displaying results in HTML

4. Need help in installing LINUX

5. Local Cache of Dynamically Generated Documents

6. XView error: NULL pointer passed to xv_set

7. Mosaic for reading Usenet

8. w64k - what does it mean?

9. Can't get Mosaic help w Linux Mosaic.

10. Iplanet 4.1 default document root overides virtual document roots

11. Great read ("Analysis of Microsoft's 'Competing with Linux' Document")

12. The document the trolls won't read

13. Editing and reading the first and last line on a document.