Types of Notes Applications

Based on their behavioral characteristics, Notes applications are classified into the following categories:

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  Reference applications

• Broadcast applications

• Collaborative applications

• Workflow applications

Reference applications are usually used to manage online reference material. Broadcast applications are used to deliver information simultaneously to a wide audience. Collaborative applications are used when teamwork is required and include discussion and tracking applications. Workflow applications are used to automate the manual flow of work with its online counterpart.

As the name suggests, reference applications are mainly used to create, organize, and publish reference materials. In such applications, the emphasis is more on the ability for content publishing and organization than on complex design elements. Most of the time, the published content remains constant for a long period. A very good example of a reference application is an online handbook on company policies and procedures.

When designing a reference application, the following factors should be considered:

• It should be easy to create or author content.

• It should be easy to organize the content into different sections or chapters when authoring.

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  It should be possible to segregate the content based on the target audience.

• A topics index should be provided so that users can easily understand the organization of the content.

• Searching for a word or a phrase should be easy.

• It should enable navigation to the related topics.

• The content should be valid for a time period.

User interaction with a reference application involves either authoring the content or reading the published content. The authoring is restricted to a few users who are responsible for creating content for the database. These applications tend to have very low to medium usage, and user access spreads evenly throughout a period of time. Usually users access the application periodically to see if any changes have been made to the existing content or new content has been published. Moreover, these applications, if replicated across servers, tend to use low- level priority for replication. This is because the content changes very infrequently.