Forum OpenACS Development: Re: [dotWRK] what it should become - part deux

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4: Re: [dotWRK] what it should become - part deux (response to 2)
Posted by Jeroen van Dongen on 03/23/03 12:33 PM
Separate from the dotWRK stuff, I've been playing around with the content-repository, cms and file-manager packages to see if I could come up with some generic object-storage/browser thingy. Originally my idea was to make sort of a 'stand-alone' version of the cms sitemap - a windows explorer like interface to the cr.

The basic idea is that one defines content-types and those content-types are 'all-in-one'-packages. They define a datamodel (leveraging the cr) as well as an API and templates for using them. It's then possible to use a generic explorer-like interface to interact with them. Each time a user wants to do something with the item, the generic interface figures out what template to use (standard cr functionality) and forwards the user to that template.

However, Roger's remarks actually triggered another (variant of that?) idea. How about creating an MS Outlook like application? Basically outlook is nothing more than a tree of folders containing objects. Each folder contains a particular type of object. E.g.
  - inbox: folder with only mail objects
  - tasks: folder with task items (shared by a group --> collabotive todo list)
  - contacts: folder with contact objects
  - notes: ...
  - ...
Most objects allow the user to attach other objects to it (e.g. tasks object allows files to be attached).

Folder views can be customized and there are aggregate views, like 'outlook today' that combine information from multiple folders.

It's just a rough idea - I've not yet a precise idea how I'd see this in the context of dotWRK. Perhaps as a concept for the personal portal?

Some thoughts:
-- Every user or workgroup has their own set of folders, with the content-types they need. By using queries or symlinks we can e.g. make shared todo's, defined in the todo list of the group,  popup in the users personal todo list as well.

-- A projects wbs could be expressed as a folder containing 'project task items', phases expressed as subfolders. This WBS/schedule folder then can have several views (e.g. a GANTT-view or a PERT-view).

Would this pig fly?

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6: Re: [dotWRK] what it should become - part deux (response to 4)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 04/14/03 11:37 PM
I like Jeroen and Roger's ideas here about work products.

For example, our company has a lot of information that we want to keep associated with a project.

In the same way that Outlook has a lot of different types of information that can be viewed throughout the inbox, I think a project should allow you to associate:

- queries on tables (our company would like to associate each product with a project, for example -- so we'd like to see a list of products in each project page).

Perhaps there could be some sort of a service contract for items that are viewed on the project page. They have to implement a certain function or something, and then they'll automatically be included on the project page...?