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[Design] introduction and a few ideas.christopher neitzert 21 Oct 2002 01:17:42 -0700
--=-aFBVAL4oUfGCzVEHcSFf Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Howdy, Oh am I glad to see a project like this in the undertaking and I'd like to offer what I may professionally and personally. At my current place of employment we recently replaced a Lotus/Domino implementation for an open and stable implementation of PHPGroupware with the end users' email client of choice. In my case that is Ximian Evolution. Which is a mixed blessing for the IT team and a sigh of relief for those of us who watch the bottom line.=20 This is not the first time I've gone this route, with the advent of this project, hopefully it will be the last. In a previous incarnation I was a member or Razorfish's MOM development team. At the end of a 4 year development cycle it was a nice HTTP based professional services firm oriented intra-net with some nice bells and whistles, though quite ahead of its time and the capabilities of the technology. Professionally I would like to offer up a testbed with the enterprise I run. I may also be able to provide some rack-space, bandwidth, and possibly a few servers for development/distribution for this project in our Data-Centers at Redundant Networks.=20 Personally I would like to contribute a few design ideas I've had over the years, and whatever else I may, for the time has come for an open standard in personal information management and a suite of applications to match. =20 Email: >POP/IMAP retrieval *Multiple Accounts - nothing sucks more than having multiple readers for multiple accounts. >user-defined views, rules, and filters *Sort by "any" is a very handy thing that many systems miss. *Crypto Signing & Encryption of Messages Integration with gnupg, or other encryption suites is one thing=20 that makes or breaks a mail reader for me. >Information Sharing & Exchange >integrated Instant Messaging & presence management (Jabber) *Wikki! (more on this below) >sending contacts and appointments via mail (iCal, vCard support) >remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data >flexible security model to control access >file and document sharing *Flexible Document Searching - I really like how Xerox's Docushare allows a user to search the contents of many different formats of document on one share server. As much as I hate the cliche of P2P, It would be pretty slick to open up a network search for the word=20 'recipes' and have it search every document share for all of the folks in my address book for their recipes. *Information Import - often in migrating from one groupware to another the biggest obstacle will be getting all that information from that system to this system, and often it is as contrived as exporting the information through three or four systems because it is faster than writing a translation engine. >remote queries, e.g., look up address in another person's contact list >automatic updating of information from remote sources: receive new=20 contacts, changes to existing ones automatically (publish-subscribe) *Access Please forgive me if I'm missing something basic here - there is a double edged sword in 'access' as I've experienced it. Local and Remote Access. Perhaps two modes of access are better than one; Local being the clients where ever they may be. Remote being something a user could connect to from any w3c compliant browser, perhaps even those airport terminals. Calendar >day/week/month views >recurring appointments >see another person's free/busy blocks for scheduling >see another person's calendars as overlays *Calendar Messaging Standard: I hated how lotus Notes sent the entire appointment information in the subject line. Conversely PHPGroupware sends no information. -- Jerry Ashers' Post answers this eloquently. **With reflection to the Flexible Security Model idea in Info Sharing & Exchange one thing that I've wished for is levels of permissions for viewers of my calendar - It would be nice to be able to deliver a level where folks are able to see when you are available but not see the contents of the meeting. Sort of like the 'mark as private' in lotus notes, yet with more intimate levels of privilege. For example; imagine scheduling an appointment with your massuses's calendar while preserving her clients anonymity, yet her receptionist is able to see those bookings by name, but not detail. =20 Other (version 1.1 and beyond?) >simple Web-style navigation (back, forward, home and home buttons, single click on a link to navigate, bookmarks, URL references to user data) >easily customizable user-defined categories >structure data how you like it, view it that way, change your mind at any time >automatic recognition of names, places, dates, and etc.; automatic=20 categorization of items >developer extensibility architecture=09 *Knowledge Database - the ability to search an organization or all users for expertise and cross reference with the calendar. Supposed I needed to find a c++ coder who spoke English and Swedish and was available Oct 22nd through Oct 29 - The ability to cross reference across all aspects of a PIM is very good. *Integrated Time Sheet/Tracking: The ability of a user to log time into a system that would reflect changes based on scheduled milestones, new projects, billing/accounting/financial forecasting. One of the things that I liked about outlook what that it is not very hard to script it to log actions within the application into a daily diary. Something like this, yet with the ability to alert upstream projects, appointments, bookings, etc of a change in schedule automatically would be super keen. *Project Management: Gant Charts are a project manager's best friend. There is a limited implementation of a centralized project/milestone tracker in PHPGroupware, that although limited when integrated into a centralized information store is much more powerful than sending everyone involved your .mpp files. Integration of this with the Knowledge Database and Time sheets would be awesome. *Wikki! I liked Lotus Same-time when it worked, and I adore Wikki. The ability to share a presentation, or application with audio and video support is crucial when working with remote individuals. *RSS:=20 I love screen scraping and filtering my news and displaying it on my client. It looks great in Evolution and PHPGroupware. *Misc: Tasks, Notes, Info/Idea/lead Tracking ***BACK END*** Harry Lee had a point about the 'back office' in his post about "big expensive server" It could be easily done with a big expensive oracle or SQL derived database in some server room, yet if i read Mitch's Idea as it was intended -- the idea is to push the group usability of PIMs to the individual and to empower each individual with the ability to work the client and all of its functionality with anyone using this client regardless of their location, size, or back-office computational power. Perhaps this is another thread, yet it seems that a localized Relational Database coupled with a LDAP-like public index of the contents of the =20 Database is the 'server like' functionality this application would need on the client side to empower the user with complete usability between clients without an infrastructure to support it. thanks for indulging me. Christopher --=20 Christopher Neitzert Director of Network Operations Redundant Networks 775-850-4222 x2229 cneitzert@redundant.com www.redundant.com personal: http://www.neitzert.com/~chris chris@neitzert.com --=-aFBVAL4oUfGCzVEHcSFf Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQA9s7gmGxzhqG3mbdoRAtxNAJ9jj36vhi4qTNx66By0SB2+oIaKkwCfUMao AKRWe2OR5tr623zYeysjJP4= =1QxY -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-aFBVAL4oUfGCzVEHcSFf--
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