The IntelliFactory Collaboration™ Framework

IntelliFactory Collaboration™ (IC) is a .NET-based framework addressing the issues of describing, creating, sharing, managing and publishing digital information. IC is built upon the notion of documents representing pieces of information from domains such as:

1. Technical reports
2. Web pages
3. News letters
4. Blog posts

IC can be easily integrated into existing .NET applications utilizing its rich API for managing content programmatically along with web components for creating and managing documents using RIA interfaces. WCS makes it easy to turn any content of an existing web site dynamic and editable.

Overview

Documents are created using Document Templates defining the structure and allowed components of documents. For instance, a Template representing a technical article may include components for highlighted source code, diagrams or text blocks. As the need for new components arise Templates can be extended or new Templates may be created tailored to a specific domain. IC provides a clear distinction between the different concerns of:

1. Defining Templates.
2. Creating Documents.
3. Rendering Documents.
4. Publishing and sharing documents.

All presentation-related configuration is performed on a global level. This enables a conform look and simplifies the creation of documents by relieving the burden of making design-specific decisions from the author.

Essential to IC is that creating and publishing assets should be as simple as possible. Creating and editing documents is straightforward using an intuitive user interface without the requirement of any Markup Language (eg. XML or Latex). For each Template a generic editor is derived allowing the user to create, edit and preview content.

Collaboration

The collaboration aspect of information management is emphasized by facilities for:

1. Sharing documents between users and groups.
2. Publishing documents using channels. E.g. blogs, emails or web-pages.
3. Attaching documents with meta information and comments.

Web components are also provided for managing documents, groups and channels.

Analyzing Document Content

IC offers fine-grained control over material contained in documents within the different domains. The inherent separation of content and presentation enables analysis by a variety of measures such as:

1. Type of content
2. Word frequencies
3. Keywords
4. Authors
5. Topics
6. Time periods
7. Meta information

Additionally, parts of documents may be extracted and composed.

Publishing

IC provides components for publishing documents for internal or external purposes. Channels can be created filtering documents based on criteria such as categories, authors, groups, labels, and levels of accessibility.

Features are also provided for:

1. Creating individual and shared publication sites.
2. Optimized search results by generating static URLs for documents published online.
3. Blog-specific features such as tag clouds and RSS feeds.