[Design] Options for Invitation workflow in 0.7

[Philippe Bossut]

Alec Flett wrote:

> I guess what I'm getting at is that the setup to get to the state 
> where you see all the free/busy times is fairly complex. Now obviously 
> long term we'd want a totally different workflow, but perhaps we can 
> tweak this:
>
>    1. when you subscribe to someone's free/busy time using the ticket
>       mechanism, it doesn't show up as a separate collection. Instead,
>       a general collection, "Contacts" shows up in the sidebar, and
>       the user gets added as a contact. The detail view for a contact
>       would include the URL for the free/busy ticket.
>
I like that. It solves the "hunting collections" issue. Note though that 
it's useful to have free/busy calendars for something else than human 
being, resources like conference rooms for instance should have a 
free/busy schedule available.

>    1. A "Schedule a meeting" menu item/toolbar item opens a dialog
>       box. This dialog box just shows you the human-specific calendars
>       - i.e. the people who you know about. You select the people who
>       you want to have a meeting with.
>
I don't like the idea of a specific dialog box. Outlook uses a similar 
dialog box and I remember creating bogus invites just to see the 
free/busy schedule of people when all I wanted to know was if they were 
in vacation for instance, not necessarily scheduling a meeting.

>           * One alternative here is to be able to select multiple
>             people in the contacts list, and have the detail view have
>             a button "Schedule a meeting" which would schedule a
>             meeting for these contacts.
>    1. When the dialog closes (or the "Schedule a meeting" button is
>       pressed), the sidebar is disabled, though the old state is
>       there. The Calendar now shows free/busy information for these
>       people. The user uses the calendar to create one meeting (i.e.
>       by double-clicking in a free space) That meeting shows up in the
>       detail view (like it does today when you double-click to create
>       one) The detail view includes two buttons, "Send Invitation" and
>       "Cancel".
>
More than likely you want to see your "My Calendar" at the same time so 
you know when you are available. Or may be another calendar that's 
relevant to this meeting? Hmm... I've the feeling that the modal aspect 
of this workflow will get people to bump into limitations because of 
some specific need they have.

>   1.
>
>
>    2. When one of these buttons are pressed, then the sidebar
>       reenables, and we go back to our old collection configuration.
>       The calendar event shows up in "My Calendar" and all is good.
>
> Thoughts?

Despite my here above criticism, I agree that free/busy is different 
enough to warrant a specific UI treatment. Here's a proposal:

1. free/busy collections show as subcollections of a Contacts/Resources 
OOTB collection: It's basically the same idea than Alec exposed here 
above though in this case the collections in the "Contacts/Resources" 
group behave as collections (more or less, see here under). This 
requires that we have one level of hierarchy in the sidebar.

2. free/busy collections do not show in Summary View, only in Calendar: 
Free/busy info are strictly time and they are read only so there's 
little use to see them in other views. Seeing such info (there's no even 
events but simple date range, possibly spanning several events) as 
uneditable text will be of little use at best, confusing at worse.

3. free/busy collections are displayed using something different than 
the normal event lozenge: Again, seeing free busy info for someone (or 
something) can be useful even when you don't create an invite. Having 
them displayed overlayed in the calendar is good, though since we have 
only time info, it's unecessary to use a lot of real estate and it's 
also useful to visually differentiate them from real events (there's not 
events but time range, potentially spanning several real events). Having 
a narrow vertical bar (don't take the whole width of the day) would be 
good and allow for several calendars to be viewed without overlap 
(though there's a limit here...)

Note also that this proposal suppress the dependency between the invite 
feature and free/busy: we could have free/busy even if invite is not 
implemented. A small but interesting aspect.

More thoughts?

- Philippe