Collaboration on the LAN

[HyperChris at aol.com]

>I'm just beginning to think about this, and looking for any and all ideas.

I always like the idea of sending people email to notify them that something 
needs their attention (they don't dare ignore my mail because I control 
payroll!) Two thoughts come to mind after reading this part in your post ...

>So, goal would be to, during these two hours, when I give the high sign
>"Photos are in!" to allow various individual on the land to
> a) view the photos in the current order they are in.
> b) be able to see captions as they are in the current state
> c) edit, add to, or write from scratch captions freely, and update

So getting back to email ... I would use it to notify them that the item has 
arrived and then perhaps follow one of these two approaches ...
 1. Send an html email with the photos a part of it and then ask that they 
reply with a caption. The email would have some sort of tag in it that would 
allow you to place the reply to the appropriate photo. That is a similar approach 
to a lot of the tech support systems that say "please include this seciton in 
your reply" You would write a rev stack to check the email account 
periodically and post these updates.
 2.   Send a text email that alerts them of a photo needing a caption with a 
link to a form style web page where the photos are displayed and the person 
adds a caption and clicks submit. You would write the rev cgi script/stack to 
update your main data

Your thin client approach also sounds promising. If your main stack simply 
holds the captions and photo URLs then the client can simply run up there and 
get that relatively small amount of information and then display it. It could 
also tag the record (card in your stack) to say it is in use OR when it goes to 
post a change it could check to see if someone else had made a change in the 
iterim and then give the user options to work it out. I usually use the latter 
because I find that two people actually changing the same record in the same 
session is so rare.

Keep us posted as lots of projects are similar to this.