[Chandler-dev] Notifications Update

[Mimi Yin]

Randy and I chatted today about Notifications: Providing users with a  
way to get reports about their via Chandler Hub.

Our goal is to find the shortest path to scratching "notifications"  
itch. Here's a proposal for how to do that.

- Delivery method: Email We decided email was the way to get started.  
All our users have email accounts that they essentially it in all day  
long. It's also best suited for the amount of information we think  
will be useful to include in the reports.

While not as ubiquitous on mobile devices as SMS, email will be  
simpler for us to support. Also, we already have email addresses for  
users who have set up Chandler Hub accounts.

- Plain text versus HTML We're going to start out with plain text and  
then worry about laying out the reports in HTML later. Plain text is  
best for mobile devices anyway.

- Settings
+ We will finally need to add a Time zone setting to the Sign-up  
workflow.

+ Specifying email addresses. While we would like to support sending  
notifications to multiple email addresses (e.g. 1 user could set up  
notifications for all the people they collaborate with). We're going  
to start out with just 1 and simply use the email address the user  
provided when they signed up for an account.

+ Frequency of reports: To start, we're going to offer Daily or  
Weekly reports.
-- Daily reports will be sent out at 6AM every morning.
-- Weekly reports will be sent out on Mondays at 6AM.
-- Monday's daily report should include a forecast for the upcoming  
week.
-- In the future, we'd like to support more settings for defining  
when you get reports.

+ This means that each users can define 1 notification report for  
each collection.

*****
Content of the Reports

To start, we're going to focus on sending out "Forecast" reports that  
tell you what's coming up on your Calendar and Triage List. This  
includes:


- Events: Title, Location, Start/End-Time, Time zone, Recurrence,  
Custom Alarm (if there is one)
- Notes with Tickler Alarms
- A list of all the items that are already in the NOW section

- Link to the Collection

In the future, we'd like to generate "Activity" reports of "what's  
happened" in a collection
- Who's created/edited what
- What did they change (before and after)
- When did they change it to
To do this will require a significant amount of infrastructure work.  
So in the interest of rolling something out sooner rather than later,  
we are focusing on "Forecast" reports first.

*****
Setting up Notifications

- Add notifications to the Gallery on the Hub homepage
- Add tab to the "Settings" dialog where users can set up  
notifications across all their collections
- Add link to the "Collection Details" dialog to the tab in "Settings"

*****
Next Actions
- Mimi to write up copy for reports
- Mimi to mock up setting up notifications

*****
Open Issues
Randy, would it be possible to roll all the reports across all of  
your collections into 1 email?
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