Power, Ease of Use and Cooperative Work in a Practical Multimedia Message System

Summary The "Messages" program, the high-end interface to the Andrew Message System (AMS), is a multimedia mail and bulletin board reading program that novices generally learn to use in less than an hour. Despite the initial simplicity, however, Messages is extremely powerful and manages to satisfy the needs of both experts and novices through a carefully evolved system of novice-oriented defaults, expert-oriented options, and a help system and option-setting facility designed to ease the transition from new user to sophisticated expert. The advanced features of the system facilitate types of cooperative work that are not possible with other mail or bulletin board systems, but which would also be impossible in large heterogeneous communities if the system were not so easily used by both novices and experts. A major example of such cooperative work is the Andrew Advisor system, a highly-evolved and sophisticated system that uses the AMS to solve the problems of distributed support for a very diverse user community in a heterogeneous computing environment. The evolution of the Advisor system and its uses of the AMS mechanisms are considered as a detailed example of the power and limitations of the AMS.