Distributed authoring and publishing in various organizations has gained more and more importance in the last few years. The Internet, the WorldWide Web, in particular, has provided the infrastructure needed for it. DAPHNE Distributed Authoring and Publishing in a Hypertext and Networked Environment is a webbased distributed authoring and publishing system arising from research and development projects of the Institut für Telematik, Germany. In this paper, DAPHNE's system architecture and key features will be described. A discussion web publishing in organizations as a case study will be given. On the server side, DAPHNE employs a database to manage dynamical text and image documents with various status values. Web browsers are used as basic clients. For document processing (e.g., writing, modifying, etc.), authors can choose any commercial software they prefer by configuring the application MIME/TYPE in the web browsers. The communication between DAPHNE server and the clients is based on HTTP. An authentication mechanisms allows only legal users the login into the system. The facilities in the system depend on the role of the user.
The workflow of collaborative authoring and publishing is supported by DAPHNE. Various roles and actions are possible, e.g. authors edit documents, directors approve of documents, web directors approve of publication, and system administrators define the layout of documents, maintain the database and so on. By means of the workflow, the quality of documents to be published can be assured as well as the dynamic updating of documents is supported.
In DAPHNE various branches which may reflect organization structure can be defined in order to manage great amounts of documents. Those branches build a tree which will be used for the construction of the navigation structure laid over the documents . Furthermore, the content and layout of a document are managed separately. The layout of a branch can be defined and will be used for all documents of the branch. In this way, an automatic layout mechanisms that includes the navigational structure and supports a standard layout has been built.
Both dynamic publishing and generating static documents on demand are supported by DAPHNE, i.e. DAPHNE can not only serve end users directly, but produce documents which can be used for web publishing or even direct for printing.