Excel 4 and Word 5.x were amongst the first applications to include Publish and Subscribe. They were written in one of those periods when Microsoft stuck to Apple's guidelines so two cracking applications were written. Alas, they weren't scriptable but at the time of release, Apple didn't have a useful version of AppleScript either.
Publish and Subscribe was all very clever and it worked, but it was beyond what most users expected. At its most basic level, P & S allowed users to create compound documents with live content, that updated when the source document was changed. In a networked environment -- and most users were just getting use to the idea when System 7 appeared -- P & S could be used for collaborative working.
Content management and document management systems for desktop PC users are in a similar position today. They are potentially very powerful but companies need to commit developers to use them in their organisations. And companies don't do it because it has an up front cost. Thus they are relegated to specialist divisions (law, medical research, aero engineering etc) where they are required to meet legislation.
And across the world, workers create documents that are stored on a mish mash of servers, passed around in multiple versions as email attachments. The only way that anyone can find anything is by "search", which isn't going to convince any regulatory authority that companies are managing information.
Publish and Subscribe was all very clever and it worked, but it was beyond what most users expected. At its most basic level, P & S allowed users to create compound documents with live content, that updated when the source document was changed. In a networked environment -- and most users were just getting use to the idea when System 7 appeared -- P & S could be used for collaborative working.
Content management and document management systems for desktop PC users are in a similar position today. They are potentially very powerful but companies need to commit developers to use them in their organisations. And companies don't do it because it has an up front cost. Thus they are relegated to specialist divisions (law, medical research, aero engineering etc) where they are required to meet legislation.
And across the world, workers create documents that are stored on a mish mash of servers, passed around in multiple versions as email attachments. The only way that anyone can find anything is by "search", which isn't going to convince any regulatory authority that companies are managing information.