Getting Started: Planning Your Approach

For your organization to optimally use ActionApps, there are many issues that you need to consider before you get started. In this section, you will learn about these issues.

What You Need to Get Started

You need the following:

• An Internet account with an APC network that offers ActionApps or have the ActionApps running on your own Website server. See <http://www.apc.org/actionapps/english/general/get.html> for a list of APC-related providers.
• A Web site
• At least one designated person responsible for your organization's content
• A plan for how you want to use ActionApps, which is covered within this section.
• A Web browser: e.g. recent versions of Opera, Mozilla, Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator

If you have your own Web server and system administration staff experienced in Linux, you can also download ActionApps and run them yourself. Find out more at: <http://www.apc.org/actionapps/english/dev/index.html> The source code for the ActionApps can be found <http://sourceforge.net/projects/apc-aa>

How Will You Use ActionApps?

Before you set up ActionApps, you should determine some basic information about how you plan to use the system:

• What sections of your Website need to be updated frequently?

This question will help you determine which sections (ActionApps calls them “slices") you want to automate or introduce into your Website. APC ActionApps can help you automate news, events, lists of links, book lists, job listings, and other Website sections. Most organizations will want to incorporate more than one slice to help you update diverse Website sections quickly and easily.

If you have very different kinds of content items, or if you want to use ActionApps with different projects, consider setting up separate slices for each Website section. This will allow you to customize the online presentation of your information for the specific needs of the projects. If your items are different in topic but have a similar structure, you can use thematic categories to organize them.

• Do you want to use ActionApps to share information with other groups?

APC ActionApps allow your organization to share information with other thematically related Websites through Content Pooling. You should make a list of organizations (or types of organizations) with which you would like to exchange pieces of news, or that you would like to republish your items. In the current version of ActionApps, Websites which share information must be hosted on the same Web server. By the end of 2001, it should be possible to share information with any other Website also running ActionApps hosted anywhere on the World Wide Web. If your preferred partners are not using ActionApps, why not suggest they look at using ActionApps too?

If you plan to use ActionApps to collaborate with or share information with other organizations, you will need to consult with these other organizations about the Website sections they intend to automate with ActionApps. This knowledge may affect your own planning.