[Design] Re: [Please review] Updates to Stamping, aka Edit/Update Spec

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:25 PM 2/22/2007 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
>Hi Phillip:
>
>I assume you mean Note items + Message stamp? As in, you're not
>talking about emailing non-Message items around?
>
>We want to support edit/update for plain message items as well. There
>are lots of use cases for collaborating on just a message:
>
>+ Working on a draft of an announcement together
>+ Working on a proposal
>+ Compiling a list of places to visit in London
>+ Putting together a packing list

I guess I'm not clear on how that isn't addressed by normal email workflows.

Or to put it more clearly, since we don't have in-field conflict resolution 
for the body, it seems to me that edit/update is actually *less* useful 
than normal email would be for this use case, since normal email at least 
preserves a history of changes (through the existence of prior emails on 
the subject), and includes a conversational flow that would be lacking here.

Or perhaps I'm entirely misunderstanding how edit/update is supposed to 
work?  But it seems to me that for text uses of the type you describe, it 
would be a giant leap backwards compared to the primitive email clients 
through which we are having this very conversation.  :)


>Also, in our user interviews, we repeatedly saw people start the
>scheduling workflow with a plain email... without a specific date/ time 
>proposal. We want users to be able to do edit/update while
>they're working out when a meeting is going to happen...and then
>stamp the message item to add it to the calendar, when they're ready to.

Which you'd still be able to do, even if we didn't do edit/update for 
non-calendar items.

By the way, I'm not saying we should abandon the idea of edit/update for 
non-calendar items, just that it seems like it should be a different 
process from the normal sending of an email.  I think that the idea of 
attaching a document (or any other item) to a message should be distinct 
from the idea of having a conversation with someone *about* a document (or 
other item).