[Design][Cosmo] User Interface for Group management in Cosmo

[Mimi Yin]

Okay, let's focus on assigning privileges for now. And this would be  
a SNARF administrator doing this? and/or Jared/Dave as administrators  
of the Hosted Service?

Just thinking aloud, these are questions for everyone. (Vinu,  
screenshots would be great.)

So the use cases would be something like:

For a class schedule calendar.
A professor granting read-write privileges to all his TAs.
A professor granting read-only privileges to his students.

For an office hours calendar, I presume the students would also have  
read-write privileges.

It seems like these groups will stay pretty static. Although on a  
semester basis, the people will change. Are there scenarios where the  
people in the groups would change on a regular basis? Monthly,  
Weekly, Daily? Maybe in situations where people work with vendors and  
contractors a lot? e.g. You're an estate manager and you have a  
calendar for scheduling repairs and maintenance whatnot? Maybe you  
want to give certain people limited access to the calendar...for as  
long as a project is going on. Once it's over, you remove them from  
the group. However, if you work with the same people over and over  
again, you may just 'suspend' some people's access and then re- 
activate them when they're needed again.

Question: Why would someone want/need to create a group to grant  
privileges? Is it so you can easily give the same group of people  
access to different shares? How common will it be in that scenario  
for their to be exceptions to the group? e.g. I'm a professor, I  
teach 3 classes. I have the same TAs for all 3 classes, except for 1.  
I give read-write privileges to my TA group for all 3 classes, except  
for the 1 TA who doesn't TA the 3rd class.

Workflow question: Can you create a group after you've granted  
privileges to a whole list of individuals.

What about query-based groups? Are these static or do they refresh?  
Can you have inclusions and exclusions? Everyone with a username that  
starts with a letter from A-M + this user who has a username that  
starts with '!' What are use cases for this? Is this mostly an admin  
feature?

How often will users create short-lived shares?
For example, you manage a calendar for tour groups to visit Des  
Moines. For the week that the tour group is visiting, the tour  
organizers and the visitors can view and edit a shared calendar to  
figure out together what they would like to do.

A twist on the tour group example. Say you work with the same travel  
agency, but the visitors themselves change. Would you want just a  
single group and then change the tour group members out every week?  
Or would you want one group for the travel agency people and then  
create a new group for each tour group every week?

Workflow question: Can you create accounts for the tour group  
visitors as you populate the group? And then send the accounts +  
passwords to the members of the tour group, at which point they can  
change their password? As an organizer, it seems like you would want  
to do that, rather than waiting for the individuals in the group to  
create their accounts before assigning privileges one-by-one.

1. When you say adding users, do you mean adding user accounts? or  
email addresses?
2. There will presumably be students who haven't yet signed up for an  
account? Using email addresses seems like it would cover both users  
with accounts and those without accounts.
3. How do privileges interact with tickets? What about per-user tickets?

Mimi


On Feb 7, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Vinubalaji Gopal wrote:

> On 2/7/07, Mimi Yin <mimi at osafoundation.org> wrote:
>> Vinu, what will these groups be used for? Categorization and
>> Organization? Addressing emails? Assigning privileges? Managing
>
> right now it will be used for assigning priviliges, but it can be
> used in any context. So I am just designing the UI for group
> management as an administrator where new groups can be created and
> users, groups can be added to that  particular group. so far its
> similar to the user management ui except that modifying a group shows
> a drag and drop ui (will add a few screenshots to show how it looks).
>
> later we could have allow users to search and join a group :) and all
> the other things like addressing a group (since each group will have
> all the emails), etc.
>
>
>
> -- 
> Vinu
>
> In a world without fences who needs Gates?
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