[Dev] Re: possible way to simplify email/server match-up

[Lisa Dusseault]

The auto-complete problem, with server accounts, is quite hard to solve 
quickly in a number of applications, not just sharing.  I'm pretty sure 
that in Outlook/Exchange situations, the Outlook client actually asked 
the Exchange server for a huge list of mail accounts (could easily be 
10,000) and cached all the account names locally for fast 
auto-complete.  Then the auto-complete combines the client-side address 
book with the server's list of accounts.  This approach means that the 
client has to synchronize that address book every so often or else new 
accounts won't be there.

That approach would work OK for WebDAV+ACL servers too, as far as I can 
think -- just a matter of more work :)

Lisa

On Feb 28, 2005, at 3:44 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:

> Yeah, 10,000 users would be a bummer. I was imagining a UI where you 
> could essentially search for users from the To: field of the Sharing 
> invitation with the option to click a button and view the entire list. 
> The experience would be quite similar to email address auto-complete.
>
> On Feb 28, 2005, at 2:56 PM, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
>
>> Yes we can certainly ping WebDAV servers to find out who has 
>> accounts.  I think our current requirements include that the sharing 
>> server support the ACL extensions, in which case this ping is trivial 
>> -- one REPORT request to find out a list of accounts.
>>
>> What if there are 10,000 accounts on the server?  Do you expect to do 
>> some kind of first or last name matching search?
>>
>> Lisa
>>
>> On Feb 25, 2005, at 3:06 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:
>>
>>> We've talked a lot about ways we could match up email addresses with 
>>> user accounts on servers so that it's easy for Chandler users to 
>>> send invitations out to other people without having to know much 
>>> more than an email account.
>>>
>>> We also talked about doing things like tickets to make it so that 
>>> users who don't have accounts on the sharer's server can still 
>>> access the share.
>>>
>>> I'm wondering if we can return to a serverized version of an idea 
>>> Mitch had a long while back for P2P that might simplify things? (aka 
>>> pre-defined Sharing Circle)
>>>
>>> When a user sets a share, Chandler pings the various servers the 
>>> sharer has accounts on and generates a list of people who also have 
>>> accounts on the same servers...User can select sharees from that 
>>> list...Depending on who the user selects, Chandler uploads the share 
>>> to the appropriate server(s). (OR Do we want to discourage that for 
>>> conflict resolution issues?) This would be the ideal since it means 
>>> the client is doing what the user wants...
>>>
>>> A compromise might be that depending on the server the user selects, 
>>> Chandler generates a list of available sharees...which means that 
>>> the user might be left in a situation where 9 of the 10 people (ie. 
>>> co-workers) they want to share with have access to 1 server (@work), 
>>> but 1 out of 10 (spouse) has access to a different server (@home). 
>>> But life isn't fair.
>>>
>>> Not sure if this "ping the server for a list of sharees" is possible 
>>> or even easier than some of the other options we've looked at, but 
>>> thought it was worth throwing out there.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>