For anyone - staff, student, or faculty - who
repetitively
interacts with a web-based application, or needs to show
someone else
how to perform a complex, multi-step task on a website, a
newly
released add-on for the Firefox web browser may be of
interest:
CoScripter
http://la
bs.mozilla.com/2007/09/coscripter/
In brief, CoScripter can record, automate, and document -
in
natural language - actions that you perform on websites.
CoScripter
is currently a research project, created by a team of
researchers at
MIT and IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose.
This screencast does a good job of explaining how
CoScripter works:
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/coscripter/browse/v
ideo
As attractive as this tool may be for some purposes, it
also may
introduce security concerns. CoScripter makes it easy to
upload
scripts to the project website, and any scripts related to
sensitive
University business processes shouldn't be shared beyond the
browser.
In addition, some processes involving access to, or
transmission of,
sensitive data probably shouldn't be documented at all using
this
tool, even if that data isn't stored within CoScripter
scripts.
FYI,
Aron Roberts
Information Services and Technology
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