[Design] Chandler as a Managed Workspace

[Mimi Yin]

I think we're aiming at shared workspaces for small groups for  
asynchronous collaboration. Whiteboard plugins would be great, but I  
think we can be extremely useful to people if we focus on the  
asynchronous interaction.

Advantages I see that we have over more mature collaboration tools is  
that Chandler integrates personal and shared workspaces, it's x- 
platform...and sharing scenarios don't require group buy-in because  
of easy, no-account-necessary access via the web browser.

Our features aren't as mature as products like Groove, but I think we  
have a better combination of features for small groups. Or at least,  
a better framework of features for small groups.

I actually think the closest approximation of what we're competing  
with is wikis, outliners, one note, word, excel, text files, email  
and 'free calendars' like iCal, Vista Calendar, and web calendars.  
These are the tools we're trying to ween users off of, at least as  
far as 'productivity use cases' go.

For most people, we're not yet useful as a managed personal/shared  
workspace. We need things like print, a better sync story, separate  
detail view, spheres in the sidebar, a more granular way to manage  
LATER items, next action/clusters support, and last but not least,  
improved usability.

But I know that we *are* already useful for some set of people. And  
we need to figure out who exactly those people are. Why is what we  
have already good enough for them such that they have Chandler open  
all the time and use it as a source of truth? Why do they use it even  
though I know everyone has a long wish list of features they'd  
really, really like to have?

For me, *that* is the pony in the product.

On Jan 7, 2008, at 5:27 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> At 03:41 PM 1/7/2008 -0800, Jeffrey Harris wrote:
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>>> Note that this approach puts us in competition with intranet  
>>> software, CMSes, virtual meeting software, Lotus Notes, and that  
>>> thing that was made by that guy before he went to Microsoft...   
>>> Ray Ozzie?    What was that thing he had that was a sharing  
>>> platform?  Groove, or something like that?  Is it still around?
>>
>> I think I've read stories about Groove still being popular in the  
>> military, because of its encrypted P2P bits.
>>
>> I agree, focusing on a shared workspace does put us in the same  
>> space as all the things PJE mentions.  Is that bad?  My sense is  
>> that people get pretty excited about shared spaces, but with the  
>> exception of Groove they're all aimed at *really* large groups.
>
> My sense is that, feature for feature, we don't stack up well  
> against such tools.  Either, as you say, they're for large groups,  
> or else there is an increasing tendency towards real-time  
> collaboration, like virtual whiteboards and collaborative editing.