[Design] [Cosmo] Login-related workflows update

[Ted Leung]

On Nov 17, 2006, at 10:34 AM, Mimi Yin wrote:

> The workflow is pretty different. In proposal 3, the user enters  
> their username password and then chooses (should probably be a  
> radio button) which UI to log into.

Oh, I see.  That's not at all how I understood it.  I get it now.

>
> In proposal 4: the user comes to osaf.us and there are links they  
> can click on to go to separate log in pages, 1 for admin and 1 for  
> browsing the home directory.

This makes the initial login experience much more complicated.

>
> This in turn could translate into bookmarkable URLs for the  
> different types of login:
>
> osaf.us/admin
> osaf.us/homedir
> osaf.us
>
> OR as Priscilla proposed, could also be:
>
> admin.osaf.us
> homedir.osaf.us
> osaf.us
>
> This way, admins and people using Cosmo for filesharing don't have  
> to tangle with the end-user Casual Collaborator UI to get where  
> they want to go.

It seems like achieving this separation is the primary goal here.     
But I'm not sure that this is desirable.

For admins: in most web applications that I've used where I had  
administrator privileges, you accessed that via a link which only  
appeared if you had admin privileges.   You logged into the  
application like any other user and then you clicked that admin link  
to get to the administrator function.

For filesharers:  If I was going to file share using Cosmo, most of  
the time I would just  be mounting a Cosmo collection directly via  
the WebDAV functionality of my desktop OS.   If I needed the home  
collection browser, I would be fine logging into Cosmo and clicking a  
link (even if it were some what hard to get to).

Also there's another use case for the home collection browser -- it  
is a valuable tool for us to help debug problems that end users are  
having, so I think that Casual Collaborators will also have a need  
(not that often I hope) to access the home collection browser.

Just some more thoughts,

Ted