[Design] Multilingualism and security design requests

[Edmund Lian]

Hello,

I've been browsing the feature summary for Chandler, and I think it's very
exciting. The choice of platforms and language is great! Indeed, I can
Chandler replacing Lotus Domino in situations where Domino's full
sophistication/complexity is not being used, and this is probably the
majority of sites I've seen.

There are three things that I think should make it into the product ASAP,
or at least be thought about during the design phase so that they can be
added later:

(1) Support for Unicode in particular, and support for languages other than
English in general. What would be nice is for someone to be able to
dynamically switch the language used for the UI, and have this preference
stored as an attribute in a profile/personality/identity. Having this
feature will make it much easier for people to share a single machine
(because it often happens at home, or in the office)

(2) Some means of encrypting and "time-bombing" local replicas of
databases. So, if someone does not connect to the source of the replica's
data within a configurable period of time, the user loses access to the
data until he/she reconnects to the source for authorization to access the
data for another set period of time. It would be desirable to be able to
configure things so that the local replicas remain encrypted and
inaccessible, or even be deleted once the user fails to connect to the
source after some period of time.

This feature would allow Chandler to be used for sensitive information, in
say, a business environment where you do not want employees taking data
with them when the leave, or if their computers are stolen, etc. The
inability to protect and control information that has been replicated
locally was one of the biggest problems I saw in Groove. It is also a
problem with Lotus Domino (but one can program databases to require
authorization tickets, and have time-bombs, it's just not easy to get
right.)

(3) This last feature is more of a nice-to-have than must-have, unlike the
other two... It would be great to have some way for user-specific data and
profiles to "float" from one machine to another, so he/she can sit down at
any client that is part of the same notional organization and pick up where
he/she left off. This particular feature would make it easier to migrate a
user from one machine to another, from one location to another.

...Edmund.