Chapter 7: The Store

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Overview

As with most media from which things are built, whether the thing is a cathedral, a bacterium, a sonnet, a fugue, or a word processor, architecture dominates material. To understand clay is not to understand the pot. What a pot is all about can be appreciated better by understanding the creators and users of the pot and their needs both to inform the material with their meaning and to extract meaning from the form.

-Alan Kay

The Store (or Information Store) has always been at the heart of Exchange. If you doubt this adage, stop the Store service and discover just how quickly users protest. As with any critical component, we have to understand, manage, maintain, and protect the Information Store, or Store. Much of the strength of the Store comes from its solid architectural base.

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