1.1 Concept

As you browse the World Wide Web, you may come across a web page that you find particularly useful for yourself or someone else, and wish to mark it for future use. With Network Menus, you can store this as a “Pagemark” — a concept similar to what you may already know as Bookmarks or Favourites. Often when browsing the Web, you will be working a particular subject, and as you work with your preferred Search Engine, you will collate several related web pages. This relationship can be represented by placing the pagemarks within the same Menu. You can create several menus pertaining to different subjects at the same time, so you can collate pagemarks for different projects, or sub-projects simultaneously. Having constructed your Menus, they can become automatically shared with other members of the Network Menus community/your business community. As you, and other members of the community, browse the web, Network Menus finds pagemarks that are related to the current page. It then pulls out the complete Menu that has been created manually, and displays these menus automatically, hence reducing the time taken to find further, related information. Additionally, Network Menus allows you to create sub-menus, so you can categorise pagemarks within menus. Network Menus extends much further than this, with features to help categorise menus and more — this is merely the beginning: read on further for more detail, or skip to Chapter 2 for instructions on how to begin using Network Menus.

1.2 Groups and Categories

Groups are used to group menus together. They can be used to provide logical topic areas for you to store menus, or they can be used to separate menus between different project groups, or to keep menus private. It is possible to specify security permissions for different groups, which limit who has access to menus within that group. There are several different types of permissions, for example it is possible that members of a department will be able to add menus to one group, but other members of the organisation will only be able to see these menus. There are two special groups that are provided by all Network Menus installations. The first is the “Public” or “Organisation” group. This group can be written to and read from by everyone in the community. Depending upon how the system is configured, this could mean everyone within your organisation, or if you use a public version (or your system is connected to the public version), it could mean everyone else in the world! It is therefore important that this is considered when one is adding menus within this group, as they could be read by anyone. The other special group is the "Private" group. Menus within this group are not shared with any other member of the community. Menus stored within this group will only appear within your personal space, they are still synchronised with the server so in the event of losing your computer you will not lose your private favourites.

1.2.1 How Categories differ from Groups

As every menu created exists within a group, groups can be used to categorise information into broad areas such as “Sport” and “News”, for example. If you create a lot of menus within one group it becomes trickier to identify the menu you want. Using categories enables you to create your own personal division of a group where you can cluster related menus. The group structure that you have will normally be controlled by a system administrator whereas you can control the categories available.